- GP practice
Southway Surgery
Assessment report published 23 July 2025
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
We carried out an announced assessment between: 4 and 11 June 2025. Southway Surgery is a GP practice which delivers a service to approximately 5600 patients under a contract held with NHS England. The National General Practice Profiles states that approximately 96% of the practice population were white and 4% were other. Information published by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the 4th decile (4 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.
This assessment was carried out to check progress against the requirements of the Warning Notices issued on 30 August 2024. At our previous assessment on 22 July 2024, we issued the provider a Warning Notice for breach of Regulation 17 Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014: Good Governance.We found the provider to be in breach of the regulation due to failure to operate systems to assess, monitor and mitigate risk relating to the health, safety and welfare of service users and failure to ensure processes were established and operated effectively.
At this assessment we found improvements had been made.
People's experience of this service
We reviewed recent NHS Friends and Family Test (FFT) which provided mainly positive feedback from patients. For example, between January and May 2025, the practice received FFT responses from 183 patients. Of these, 162 (88.5%) patients described their experience of the service as good or very good, whilst 16 (8.7%) described their experience of the service as poor or very poor. The remaining 5 (2.7%) responded neither. This is an improvement when compared to the previously reported figures. We noted positive comments from people in relation to prompt responses from their initial triage to seeing a clinician. Staff were friendly and helpful and they found it easy to access appointments. Negative comments referred to concerns around communication with people in the waiting room regarding appointment times.
There was an active patient participation group (PPG) which had formed in June 2024 who represented the views of people using the service. Representatives from the PPG described how they felt listened to. They were looking to encourage more patient participation and have not been able to make suggestions for improvements due to the low number of attendants. The practice had set up a social media account and were considering virtual meetings to encourage a higher number of participants.