Abingdon Family Health Care Centre

Updated 21 February 2024

Abingdon Family Health Care Centre is a NHS GP practice which provides primary care services to patients in Liverpool. We carried out an announced assessment of one quality statement, equity of access, under the key question Responsive at Abingdon Family Health Care Centre on 6 March 2024. The practice is rated as good overall and continues to be rated as good for providing a responsive service. We carried out the assessment as part of our work to understand how practices are working to try to meet people’s demand for access and to better understand the experiences of people who use services and providers. We recognise the pressure that practices are currently working under, and the efforts staff are making to maintain levels of access for their patients. At the same time, our strategy makes a commitment to deliver regulation driven by people’s needs and experiences of care. The assessment of the quality statement ‘Equity in access’ includes looking at what practices are doing innovatively to improve patient access to primary care and sharing this information to drive improvement. We found that the practice had organised services to be responsive to patients’ needs, including those who were most likely to have difficulty accessing care. However, the provider outlined challenges they have experienced with the phone system and the impact this has had for patients contacting the practice by phone and their experience of making an appointment. During the assessment process the provider highlighted the efforts they were making to improve the responsiveness of the service for their patient population, this included providing the majority of appointments on the day of request. However, there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that efforts made to date had improved patient experience in this area.

Updated 21 February 2024

Patient feedback about their experience of accessing the practice by phone was lower than the national average in the GP national patient survey. The practice score for satisfaction was 21.7% compared to the national average of 49.6%. Patient overall experience of making an appointment was also lower than average. The provider told us they had experienced challenges with the phone system and they had tried to make improvements to this and had taken action to provide alternative ways for patients to contact the practice in the meantime. The provider told us that a new phone system was scheduled to be introduced imminently and that this would provide a cloud based system with functionality for call queuing, call back and would better support the monitoring of call volumes. The results of the NHS Friends and Family test for December 2023 showed that 100% of patients reported that their experience of the practice was good or very good. There was only one patient review on the NHS website posted over past 12 months. This was a negative review that sited difficulties in getting through to the practice by phone as a concern and rated the practice as one out of five stars. We did not receive feedback from patients in our ‘Give feedback on care’ link that the provider was asked to share with a proportion of patients as part of this assessment process.