• Doctor
  • GP practice

The Garth Surgery

Overall: Good read more about inspection ratings

Rectory Lane, Guisborough, Cleveland, TS14 7DJ (01287) 632206

Provided and run by:
The Garth Surgery

Latest inspection summary

On this page

Background to this inspection

Updated 30 August 2019

The Garth Surgery is located at Rectory Lane, Guisborough, Cleveland, TS14 7DJ. Situated in the north east of England, Guisborough is a small historic market town which has good transport links and is accessed by major roads. There is a medical practice located immediately next door to The Garth Surgery, in addition to a pharmacy.

The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities; diagnostic and screening procedures, treatment of disease, disorder or injury, and surgical procedures. These are delivered from a single site.

The Garth Surgery is situated within the South Tees Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and provides services to around 10,800 patients under the terms of a general medical services (GMS) contract. This is a contract between general practices and NHS England for delivering services to the local community.

The practice has five GP partners, (two males and three females) and three salaried GPs, (three females). The practice is a teaching practice. In addition to the GPs, there are three practice nurses, three nurse practitioners (all female) and three female health care assistants. There are several administration staff.

The practice opens from 8.00am – 6.00pm Monday to Friday. The practice closes at 2.00pm every Tuesday for protected staff learning and reopens at 4.30pm until 8pm. There are Saturday appointments held at The Garth Surgery which opens at 8.30am till 11.00am.

The practice is part of the wider network of GP practices who have formed a federation within South Tees CCG (ELM Alliance). The service operates from 6pm until 8am every day. From 6pm until 9.30pm extended hours appointments are available at four hubs across the borough. Two of the hubs deliver services during the night. Patients can access this service via the NHS 111 service.

There are a higher than average number of patients over the age of 65 years, and fewer patients aged under 18 years, than the national average. The National General Practice Profile states that 99% of the practice population is from a white background. Information published by Public Health England, rates the level of deprivation within the practice population group as four, on a scale of one to ten. Level one represents the highest levels of deprivation and level ten the lowest. Male life expectancy is 81 years compared to the national average of 79 years. Female life expectancy is 82 years compared to the national average of 83 years.

Overall inspection

Good

Updated 30 August 2019

We carried out an announced, focussed follow-up inspection at The Garth Surgery on 1 August 2019 as part of our inspection programme.

We decided to undertake an inspection of this service following a previous rating, in January 2019, of Requires Improvement for providing safe services. We rated the practice as Requires Improvement for providing safe services because the arrangements in respect of; infection prevention and control, recognising sepsis, the tracking of blank prescriptions through the practice, authorisation of Patient Group Directions, monitoring high-risk medicines, and emergency medicines’ storage needed improving. The full comprehensive report on the January 2019 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for The Garth Surgery on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

This inspection looked at the following key questions:

  • Safe

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

  • what we found when we inspected
  • information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services and
  • information from the provider, patients, the public and other organisations.

At this August 2019 inspection we saw that the practice had made improvements in all of the areas of concern that we found in January 2019.

We have now rated this practice as good overall: good for all key questions, and good for all population groups.

We found that:

  • The practice provided care in a way that kept patients safe and protected them from avoidable harm.

Whilst we found no breaches of regulations, the provider should:

  • Update the infection prevention and control policy to contain the actions required for notifiable and/or communicable diseases.

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