Archived: Brookside Health Centre

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Brookside Health Centre, Queens Road,

Freshwater, Isle of Wight, PO40 9DT on 4 March 2015. Overall the practice is rated as good.

Specifically, we found the practice to be good for providing, safe, caring, responsive and well –led services. It was also good for providing services for older people, people with long term conditions, families, children and young people, working age people (including those recently retired and students), people whose circumstances may make them vulnerable and people experiencing poor mental health (including people with dementia). It required improvement for providing effective services.

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

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns, and to report incidents and near misses. Information about safety was recorded, monitored, appropriately reviewed and addressed.

• Patients’ needs were assessed and care was planned and delivered following best practice guidance. Staff had received training appropriate to their roles and any further training needs had been identified and planned.

• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.

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

• The practice had responded to difficulties in recruiting GPs, by employing Advanced Nurse Practitioners. This meant that the appointments system being used provided more flexibility for patients to make appointments that suited them.
• Patients said they found it easy to make an appointment with a GP and that there was continuity of care, with urgent appointments available the same day.

• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.

However there were areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

Importantly the provider must :

• Maintain records relating to the management of regulated activities. This means anything relevant to the planning and delivery of care and treatment. To include governance arrangements such as clinical governance, policies and procedures, service and maintenance records, audits, and reviews, purchasing, actions plans in response to risk and incidents. We saw that policies required updating and in one case there was no policy in relation the Disclosure and Barring service checking.

The provider should:

• Ensure that there is a process for good governance at the practice in particular to assess, monitor and improve the quality and safety of the services provided in carrying on of the regulated activity this should include the quality of the experience of patients in receiving those services.
• Ensure that information about Health and Safety is up to date, accurate and properly analysed. There was a health and safety policy but this had not been updated reviewed since 2013.
• Have effective leadership communication systems to ensure that people who use the service and relevant staff within the practice know the results of reviews about the quality and safety of the service and any actions being taken. We saw that the practice held clinical meetings but practice staff meetings had not taken place for several months.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice