Archived: Jacksdale Medical Centre

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Jacksdale Medical Centre on 6 March 2015. Overall the practice is rated as requires improvement.

Specifically, we found the practice to require improvement for providing safe and well led services. It was rated good for providing effective, caring and responsive services. The concerns we identified in the safe and well-led domains relate to everyone who uses the practice including the population groups. Therefore all the population groups we inspected were rated as requires improvement.

Our key findings were as follows:

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns, and to report incidents and near misses. However, information about safety was not always recorded, monitored, appropriately reviewed and addressed.
• Risks to patients were assessed and well managed, with the exception of those relating to recruitment checks.
• Although some audits had been carried out, we saw no evidence that audits were driving improvement in performance to improve patient outcomes.
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
• Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand.
• Urgent appointments were usually available on the day they were requested. However patients said that they sometimes had to wait a long time for non-urgent appointments.
• The practice had a number of policies and procedures to govern activity. The practice did not hold regular governance meetings.

However, there were also areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

Importantly, the provider must:

• Ensure the methods used for recording, reporting, investigating, review and dissemination of learning from significant events, near misses and complaints are robust.
• Ensure that all necessary employment checks are obtained and kept of file.

In addition the provider should:

• Strengthen infection prevention and control processes.
• Ensure audits complete their full cycle in order to demonstrate improvements made to practice.
• Introduce a system for checking that equipment is in date.
• Record all complaints and introduce a system to review complaints for trends or themes.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice