Dearne Valley Group Practice

Updated 13 January 2025

Date of Assessment: 26 February 2025 to 4 March 2025.

Dearne Valley Group Practice is a GP practice located in Thurnscoe, Rotherham. The practice has a Branch site at the Goldthorpe Centre in Goldthorpe, Rotherham. The practice delivers services to 11,500 patients under a contract held with NHS England. The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities; diagnostic and screening procedures, maternity and midwifery services; treatment of disease, disorder or injury and surgical procedures. These are delivered from both sites. We inspected and rated this service under our previous methodology in March 2016. The practice was rated Good overall and in all key questions. At this assessment the practice has been rated Requires Improvement overall and for the key questions safe and effective. Caring, responsive and well-led have been rated as Good. The service was in breach of legal regulation 12, safe care and treatment. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to these concerns.

Managers told us that at the direction of their local ICB they used a clinical search system called Eclipse. However, this did not always identify patients requiring regular monitoring or follow up, such as those with long term conditions or prescribed high risk medicines. We expect all GP Practices to have systems in place to review these patients in line with best practice guidance.

The National General Practice Profiles states that 97% of the practice population are white, with 0.8% Asian and 0.8% Black. Information published by Office for Health Improvement and Disparities shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the 1st decile (1 of 10). The lower the decile, the more deprived the practice population is relative to others. This assessment considered the demographics of the people using the service, the context the service was working within and how this impacted service delivery. Where relevant, further commentary is provided in the quality statements section of this report.

Updated 13 January 2025

Patient feedback we reviewed during this assessment was mixed. We received feedback from patients who expressed concerns about being able to access appointments at the practice. We also received positive feedback which praised staff for their kind and friendly attitude and how grateful they were for the service provided. The 2024 National GP Patient Survey, (released in July 2024), showed that 55% of patients described their overall experience of this GP practice as good. This was below the local average of 76% and the national average of 74%. Data from the National GP Patient Survey consistently showed that the practice scored lower than local and national averages in the majority of categories. The practice shared with us feedback it had gathered from patients. Although this data was unverified it showed a more positive picture from patients. From 872 responses received 68% of patients rated the service provided as either 4 or 5 stars.