Sandy Health Centre Medical Practice

Updated 17 May 2022

Sandy Health Centre Medical Practice is located in Sandy at:

Sandy Health Centre,

Northcroft,

Sandy,

SG19 1JQ

There is a dispensary at the practice that is open Monday to Friday from 8am to 12.30pm and from 1.30pm to 5pm. This service is available for patients that live in the surrounding villages

The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities; diagnostic and screening procedures, family planning, maternity and midwifery services, surgical procedures and treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

The practice is situated within the Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes (BLMK) Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and delivers General Medical Services (GMS) to a patient population of about 8850. This is part of a contract held with NHS England.

The practice is a member of a primary care network (PCN) that enables them to work with other practices in the area to deliver care.

Information published by Public Health England shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the eighth decile (eight of 10). The lower the decile, the more deprived the practice population is relative to others.

According to the latest available data, the ethnic make-up of the practice area is 95% White, 2% Asian, 2% Mixed and 1% Black.

The age distribution of the practice population closely mirrors the local and national averages with a slightly lower than average number of patients aged 20 to 34 years.

The practice has three GP partners, two female and one male and two salaried GPs, one female and one male. They are supported by a physician’s associate and a clinical pharmacist, both female. The nursing team consists of a nurse prescriber, a paramedic, two practice nurses, a healthcare support worker and two phlebotomists, all female. There is a team of reception, administrative and dispensary staff. The practice is led by a practice manager, an office manager, a dispensary manager and a reception manager.

Due to the enhanced infection prevention and control measures put in place since the pandemic and in line with the national guidance, most GP appointments were telephone consultations. If the GP needs to see a patient face-to-face then the patient is offered a choice of either the main GP location or the branch surgery.

The practice operates from a purpose-built property, that is shared with other services. There is disabled access throughout. There is a large car park outside the surgery, with disabled parking available.

Sandy Health Centre Medical Practice is open from 8am to 6.30pm on Monday to Friday. The practice is part of an extended access hub offering patients appointments on Saturday mornings and from 6.30pm to 8pm in the evenings.

When the practice is closed, out of hours services can be accessed via the NHS 111 service.

Updated 17 May 2022

We carried out an announced inspection at Sandy Health Centre Medical Practice on 25 November 2020.

The practice was rated as good overall; however, they were rated as requires improvement for providing responsive services.

The report for the November 2020 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Sandy Health Centre Medical Practice on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

This inspection carried out on 6 May 2022 was a desk-based review to confirm that the practice had made the necessary improvements in the areas we identified at our previous inspection in November 2020.

We based our judgement of the quality of care at this service on a combination of:

• information sent to us from the provider.
• information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services.

We rated the practice as good for providing responsive services because:

• the practice had put an action plan in place to improve patient satisfaction.
• actions taken by the practice to improve satisfaction had resulted in an improvement to the National GP patient survey indicators.

Additionally, where we previously told the practice they should make improvements our key findings were as follows:

• The practice had put a system in place to manage safety alerts. This was overseen by the practice pharmacist. Standard codes were used on the patient computer record system to identify when medicine reviews had been completed.
• Improvements had been made to the uptake of cervical cancer screening for eligible patients. The practice had achieved an 83% uptake which exceeded the Public Health England target of 80%. This compared to the previous inspection in November 2020 when the practice achieved 79%.
• The practice had reduced the number of new patient notes that required summarising by training additional staff to carry out the role.
• The practice completed their own water temperature checks to mitigate against the risk of Legionella. Previously they had relied on an external company to complete the checks who were unable to carry them out every month during restrictions in place for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care