Archived: Cromer Group Practice

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Cromer Group Practice on 23 September 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good.

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.

• The practice undertook a wide range of both clinical and non clinical audits to drive improvements in patient care.

• The practice was actively involved in local and national initiatives to enhance the care offered to patients. They were proactive in trialling new ways of working to ensure they continued to meet the needs of the patients.

• 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). Information about how to complain was available and easy to understand.

• There was a structured system for providing staff in all roles with annual appraisals of their work and planning their training needs.

• The practice was committed to primary care development and education. They took an active part in GP education and primary care research

• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt supported by management.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• The practice provided a daily ‘ward round’ to a local nursing home. This service was greatly valued by both staff and residents at the home. Evidence from the clinical commissioning group showed that this had reduced the number of hospital admissions and referrals from the home as a result.

• In response to a complaint about the lack of information for bereaved patients, the practice had devised its own support leaflet , ‘Coping with bereavement’ which had been taken up by the CCG and shared for use by other local practices.

However there were areas of practice where the provider should make improvements:

• The practice should appoint leads for safeguarding, infection control and mental capacity and ensure these staff receive training at an appropriate level

• The practice should undertake an assessment of the risks in not carrying emergency medicines on patient home visits.

• The practice should ensure that all staff who undertake chaperone duties receive appropriate and effective training for this role. A risk assessment should also be completed if staff do not have a disclosure and barring check (DBS) in place, and are undertaking chaperone duties.
• The practice should assure themselves that any locum GPs recruited from an agency have the appropriate DBS checks in place.
• All treatment rooms should have privacy curtains around examination couches.
• The practice should restrict access to the dispensary to authorised staff only and implement measures to track prescription forms in accordance with national guidance.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice