Saltley Centre for Health Care

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Saltley Centre for Health Care on 13 June 2019 as part of our inspection programme.

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 have rated this practice as requires improvement overall and requires improvement for all population groups.

We rated the practice as good for providing safe services because:

• There were effective systems for keeping patients safe from abuse and harm.
• Risks were generally well managed. The practice was aware that they had a staffing issues and were reliant on the support of locum staff but had plans in place to address.
• There were effective systems for managing incidents, complaints and safety alerts.
• Patient records seen were comprehensive and demonstrated appropriate management of patients care and treatment needs.

We rated the practice as requires improvement for providing effective, caring, responsive and well led services and all population groups because:

• Patient outcomes as reported through national data (prior to the practice merger) showed mixed performance in relation to local and national averages. In particular, diabetes indicators and uptake of national cancer screening was low.
• There was mixed feedback from patients about the quality of consultations, the practice hoped that improvements in staffing would help improve patient satisfaction.
• Patient feedback about how they accessed care and treatment in a timely way was below local and national averages. Issues relating to access impacted on all population groups.
• Leaders were focussed on aligning the practices following the merger to support future resilience and promote high quality care. They were aware of some of the challenges faced in particular around workforce and were working to address those. However, further work was still needed to identify other areas of priority relating to effective and responsive care and in the development of clear action plans for monitoring success.
• Although there were systems for sharing learning, this did not currently extend to all staff.

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

• Complete safeguarding training requirements for all clinical staff in line with the competency framework as set out in the intercollegiate guidance.
• Improve systems to ensure appropriate supervision of non-medical prescribers.
• Improve systems for ensuring all staff are involved in learning from areas such as incidents, complaints, alerts and best practice discussions.
• Review patient outcome and satisfaction data in which the practices have been identified as an outlier to identify how uptake and services could be further improved.
• Review systems for supporting patients who have been recently bereaved.

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