Archived: SEEDS - Basildon Hospital Also known as Basildon and Thurrock University Hospital

Updated 28 April 2014

South Essex Emergency Doctors Service (SEEDS) is a co-operative of local GPs based at Thurrock Community Hospital and Basildon Hospital in the Children's Outpatients Department, who are responsible for out-of-hours primary care when GP surgeries are closed.  There are currently 31 membership surgeries incorporating 73 doctors all of whom are based in Thurrock, Basildon, Billericay and Wickford.  SEEDS is a non-profit making organisation which covers a patient base of 154,000.

Updated 28 April 2014

South Essex Emergency Doctors Service (SEEDS) is a co-operative of local GPs based at Thurrock Community Hospital.  They are responsible for out-of-hours primary care when GP surgeries are closed and cover a population of 154,000.  One primary care centre is at the Thurrock community Hospital and the other is in the children’s outpatients department at Basildon Hospital.  This report only relates to the Basildon Hospital location.  There is a separate report for the Thurrock Community Hospital location.

We chose to inspect SEEDS Basildon as one of the Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services’ first new inspections because we were keen to visit a range of different types of out-of-hours provider

Our inspection team included CQC inspectors, GP, a practice nurse and a practice manager.  Before our inspection we carried out an analysis of data from our Intelligent Monitoring system.  This did not highlight areas of risk across the five key question areas.

The inspection team spent eight hours visiting the out-of-hours service and visited the service’s primary care centre at Basildon Hospital. We spoke with six patients and seven staff. Overall the patients we talked with at SEEDS BASILDON were very positive about the care they received. Staff told us that they felt proud to work at the service. There was a positive sense of community, with high levels of support. The feedback received from patients and the public throughout the inspection was consistent with this.

The service was well-managed and benefited from a stable staff team, clear governance and experienced board. This supported the high level of staff engagement and staff satisfaction. We observed call handlers dealing with patients sensitively and politely. There was an effective process for passing patients’ details to the duty doctor and for monitoring the progress of patients through the process.

There were good processes in place to store and manage medicines. These helped to protect people from the risks associated with the use of medicines. 

However, the provider had not carried out criminal records bureau (CRB) or disclosure and barring service (DBS) checks on doctors employed by SEEDS who were not members of the co-operative.  Nor had it obtained references for any of the doctors not already known to the co-operative.  This meant there was a risk that unsuitable doctors might be employed by the service to deliver patient care.

The provider submitted an action plan, to us, in May 2014 detailing how they intended to achieve compliance by June 2014. 

We conducted a follow up desk based review of information and spoke with staff to assess if the provider had met the regulations. We found that SEEDS had reviewed its recruitment policy following our inspection and introduced mandatory DBS checks for all their staff. They maintained a central database of all staff details and ensured all mandatory checks had been conducted prior to staff commencing their employment.