Glenroyd Medical

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Glenroyd Medical on 14 June 2016. Overall the practice is rated as outstanding.

Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents and near misses. All opportunities for learning from internal and external incidents were maximised.
• Feedback from patients about their care was consistently positive.
• The practice worked closely with other organisations and with the local community in planning how services were provided to ensure that they meet patients’ needs. For example, they had initiated, piloted and developed a project to give same day access to community matron assessment services.
• Opportunities for service development were identified and positively supported, for example in the provision of a pulmonary rehabilitation service.
• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and from the patient participation group (PPG).
• The practice had worked on identifying patients with possible underlying chronic disease who had not previously been given a diagnosis and had identified a total of 999 patients across all chronic disease areas. The practice reviewed these patients, calling them into the practice where necessary and identified those patients needing diagnosis and treatment for their long term condition.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs. The practice had identified that there was a need to improve access for patients with hearing difficulties and two of the practice staff had trained in basic sign language.
• The practice actively reviewed complaints and how they are managed and responded to, and made improvements as a result. They shared and discussed complaints in an open manner with the PPG.
• The practice had a clear vision which had quality and safety as its top priority. The strategy to deliver this vision had been produced with stakeholders and was regularly reviewed and discussed with staff.
• The practice had strong and visible clinical and managerial leadership and governance arrangements. Staff were proud of the practice and were constantly involved in developing and supporting new ways of providing treatment.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• The practice was proactive in developing a practice team that offered an optimum skill mix to support the GPs. The numbers of clinical staff and the wide range of nursing skills improved patient access to appointments.
• The practice had recognised that patients referred for community assessment using a Doppler machine were having a lengthy wait to be seen. (Doppler assessments look at blood flow in the major arteries and veins in the limbs). The practice had arranged training in the use of the Doppler machine for one of its nurses with the vascular nurse practitioners at the hospital. This shortened waiting times for those patients needing assessment.
• One of the practice nurses and the practice fitness instructor provided a pulmonary rehabilitation service for all patients in the clinical commissioning group (CCG).
• The practice used innovative and proactive methods to improve patient outcomes, working with other local providers to share best practice. For example, one of the practice pharmacists had identified a common theme in incidents reported to the clinical commissioning group (CCG) and highlighted this to them. The CCG then asked the other 22 practices in the area to address this issue.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice