Archived: Hampshire Doctors On Call

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out a focused inspection of Hampshire Doctors On Call to check that action had been taken since our previous inspection in November 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good.

At our previous inspection, the service was rated good for Effective, Caring, Responsive and Well Led services and was rated as good overall. However, the practice was rated as requires improvement in the Safe domain due to breaches of regulations relating to the safe delivery of services.

This was because:

• Non-clinical staff who acted as a chaperone had not received appropriate training and the policy did not reflect the role and purpose. Staff members acting as a chaperone did not have a risk assessment or a criminal records check via the disclosure and barring service (DBS). Where the decision had been made not to carry out a DBS check on staff, the service was unable to give a clear rationale as to why the check had not been carried out.

• Relevant staff had not received all mandatory training including safeguarding children and basic life support.

We inspected the service on 29 and 30 September 2016 to confirm that they now met legal requirements.

You can read the last published report from our last comprehensive inspection of Hampshire Doctors on Call on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

Our key findings for this inspection were as follows:

• The provider had been working with the five local clinical commissioning groups to discuss how to improve and maintain response times for patients accessing the service.
• There was an open, transparent approach and a system in place for reporting and recording significant events.
• The provider had introduced a programme of mandatory training modules for members of staff and was working through the programme. We saw that emails had been sent out from management to members of staff reminding them to complete the modules and a matrix was provided showing that 90% of the courses had been completed at the time of our inspection.
• Relevant staff had received chaperone training and the provider carried out Disclosure and Barring Service checks for employees who may be asked to carry out the role of a chaperone. The chaperone policy had been reviewed and subsequently staff were issued with an aide memoir of the role. The provider had a continuing training programme for staff to become chaperones if they wanted to be. We saw patient information was available in the treatment sites we visited about chaperoning services.
• Disclosure and Barring Service checks for employees were now being carried out.
• The service had clearly defined processes and practices in place to keep people safe and safeguarded from abuse.
• The service was introducing a new staff appraisals policy and process however they were unable to produce evidence that appraisals were regularly taking place. The service had taken over the responsibility for the delivery of the contract in April 2015. This included more than140 self-employed GPs working in 10 sites and more than100 employees from the previous service provider transferring. Staff we spoke with told us that they had received an appraisal when working for the previous employer in 2015. We were told the staff appraisals were due to commence in late 2016.

The practice is now rated good for Safe services.

However there were areas where the service should be improved.

• The provider should improve on the delivery of plans for all staff employed to have an appraisal annually that is recorded.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice