Crawcrook Medical Centre

Updated 3 January 2025

Date of Assessment: 25 February 2025. Crawcrook Medical Centre is a GP practice and delivers services to 20,421 patients under a contract held with NHS England.

The practice has branch surgeries at:

• Rowlands Gill, The Grove, Rowlands Gill, NE39 1PW
• Blaydon, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5NW
• Grange Road, Grange Road, Ryton, NE40 3LT

The practice is situated within the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB). This is part of a contract held with NHS England which is an Alternative Provider Medical Services (APMS) contract.

The provider of the service is Reimagining General Practice GPMS Services Ltd which is owned by a GP and a non-clinical manager both acting as chief medical officer and chief executive. The GP is the CQC registered manager.

According to the latest available data, the ethnic makeup of the practice area is 97.6% White, 0.9% Mixed, 0.8% Asian, 0.3% Black and 0.4% Other. Information published by Public Health England shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the eighth lowest decile (8 of 10). The lower the decile, the more deprived the practice population is relative to others. This assessment considered the demographics of the people using the service, the context the service was working within and how this impacted service delivery.

The practice’s opening hours are Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm.

There were out of hours arrangements in place at the practice and other local practices, evenings and Saturday. Out of hours services are provided via the NHS 111 service.

The last comprehensive inspection of this service took place in August 2023, when it was rated as requires improvement overall and for the key questions well led and responsive. The key questions safe, effective and caring were all rated as good. We carried out this assessment on 25 February 2025. The reason for the assessment was in response to the previous inspection which rated the responsive and well led key questions as requires improvement. The key questions safe, effective and caring were not re rated.

The service has been rated as requires improvement overall and requires improvement for the key questions of responsive and well led.

We found a breach of the legal regulations in relation to governance.

Whilst there have been some improvements since our previous inspection these were more recent and therefore insufficiently embedded to be illustrated in the available data, particularly with patient access to the service. There also remains some concerns around the culture of the provider resulting in reported poor staff retention, particularly administration staff, higher workloads, lack of staff input into vision and values, lack of visibility of senior leaders and lack of awareness of complaints and learning for the practice.

We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.

Updated 3 January 2025

Feedback from patients from the various sources of information available were mixed.

Recent survey results from the NHS Friends and Family Test, indicated a lower than average level of satisfaction with the services provided. In January 2025, 68% of respondents were likely or extremely likely to recommend the GP practice to their friends and family. We compared the results to January 2024 where 66% were likely or extremely likely to recommend the practice. We noted a significant increase in patients participating in the survey in 2025 of 778 patients compared to the previous year of 136 patients. There were minor improvements in views shown in the most recent data.

The practice had prepared a survey for patients which they sent out in May and November 2024. The survey sought to gauge patients’ perceptions of the quality of care received, with a particular focus on clinical interactions. There was a commentary on the results and conclusions with recent and future changes to help improvements listed. We saw there was an improvement in overall satisfaction from 65.2% in May 2024 to 68.2% in November 2024.

The commission has received 15 complaints about the service in the last 12 months. Some complaints referred to more than one issue as follows: 9 referred to access; 2 reception staff/privacy; 2 the complaints process; 2 medication issues and 1 governance and service quality.

We shared a link on our website during our assessment for patients to give us feedback on their care. However, no patients provided any feedback through this.

The practice sent us copies of 5 thank you cards received, which were positive and thanked the staff for good care and kindness.

There was an active patient participation group (PPG) consisting of approximately 40 patients, who represented the views of people using the service. The last meeting was in August 2024, with the November 2024 meeting being cancelled by the practice. The next meeting was scheduled to take place in March 2025. The PPG had drawn up an action plan as a result of the previous CQC inspection in 2023 and Healthwatch report in February 2024. At the time of the inspection the practice had not taken any action on this and it remained under consideration.

Leaders from 3 of the 4 aligned care homes we spoke to provided positive feedback on the standard of care delivered by the staff to their residents.