Tottington Medical Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Tottington Medical Practice (a location managed by Tower Family Healthcare) on 30 August 2023. Overall, the practice is rated as requires improvement.

Safe - requires improvement

Effective - requires improvement

Caring - good

Responsive - requires improvement

Well-led - requires improvement

During the inspection process, the practice highlighted efforts they are making to improve outcomes for their patient population. The effect of these efforts is not yet reflected in verified outcomes data. However, the provider was continuing to take steps to improve access, by the use of a capacity tracker. We saw that the practice was monitoring closely telephone performance data and had worked to recruit more GPs and non-clinical support staff. As such, the ratings for this inspection has not been impacted. However, we continue to monitor the data and where we see potential changes, we will follow these up with the practice.

The full reports for previous inspections can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Tottington Medical Practice on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

Why we carried out this inspection

We carried out this inspection in line with our inspection priorities.

How we carried out the inspection

This inspection was carried out in a way which enabled us to spend a minimum amount of time on site.

This included:

• Conducting staff interviews using video conferencing.
• Completing clinical searches on the practice’s patient records system (this was with consent from the provider and in line with all data protection and information governance requirements).
• Reviewing patient records to identify issues and clarify actions taken by the provider.
• Requesting evidence from the provider.
• A short site visit to Tottington Medical Practice. (The 3 branch surgeries were not visited at this inspection)

Our findings

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.

We found that:

• Staff had received appropriate training and there were effective health and safety risk assessments.
• Patients received effective care and treatment that met their needs. However, we identified some areas that required improvement such as effective medicine review and monitoring of patients with long term conditions and those on high-risk medicines.
• The provider had achieved higher than the international target in childhood vaccinations for children at 1 year of age and met minimum national targets across the remaining childhood vaccinations.
• Staff dealt with patients with kindness and respect and involved them in decisions about their care.
• Patients could not consistently access the provider via telephone in a timely way which was reflected in the latest results of the National Patient Survey.
• The provider had developed a clear vision for the management of the practice, and the staff team felt supported in their development and described a positive working culture.

We found a breach of regulations. The provider must:

• Establish effective systems and processes to ensure good governance in accordance with the fundamental standards of care.

We also found that the provider should:

• Improve the management of safety alerts to ensure patient safety.
• Improve the way clinical searches are completed to ensure potential risks to patient care are identified and managed.
• Continue to monitor and improve cervical screening rates.
• Continue with efforts to seek and act on patient feedback and embed learning to improve the patient experience.

Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Health Care