Alverton Practice

Updated 6 October 2022

Alverton Practice merged with another location in a neighbouring town in April 2021 and has rebranded as Atlantic Medical Group. However, it remains registered with the Care Quality Commission under the name of Alverton Practice.

Alverton Practice is located at:

St Clare Medical Centre

St Clare Street

Penzance

TR18 3DX.

It has two branch locations:

Newlyn Surgery

New Road

Newlyn

Penzance

TR18 5PZ

Cape Cornwall Surgery

St Just

Market Street

Penzance

Cornwall

TR19 7HX

We visited both branch locations as part of this inspection.

The surgery has good transport links and there is a pharmacy located onsite. The branch location at Cape Cornwall also has a dispensary.

The practice moved to the purpose-built medical centre in February 2019 and shares the premises with two other GP practices. Although the practice remains independent of the other practices, all three GP practices share health and safety management systems, emergency medicines and equipment.

The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the following regulated activities: diagnostic and screening procedures, family planning, maternity and midwifery services, surgical procedures, and treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

Alverton Practice is situated within the Kernow Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and provides services under the terms of a personal medical services (PMS) contract. This is a contract between general practices and NHS England for delivering services to the local community.

The practice is a research and training practice for doctors training to become GPs as well as being a teaching practice for medical students. The practice also hosts nursing students and trainee physician associates.

Out of hours services are provided by the NHS 111 service.

Updated 6 October 2022

We carried out an announced focused inspection at Alverton Practice (Atlantic Medical Group) on 23 August 2022. Overall, the practice is rated as Good.

• Safe - Good
• Effective - Good
• Well-led – Good

Following our previous inspection on 26 September 2019, the practice was rated Good overall and for safe, effective, caring and well led. The practice was rated as Outstanding for Responsive. Because of the assurance received from our review of information we carried forward the ratings for the following key questions:

• Caring - Good
• Responsive - Outstanding.

The full reports for previous inspections can be found by selecting the ‘All inspection reports and timeline’ link for Alverton 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 and inspected the following key questions:

• Safe
• Effective
• Well led

How we carried out the inspection/review

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.

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:

• The practice provided care in a way that kept patients safe and protected them from avoidable harm.
• Patients received effective care and treatment that met their needs.
• The way the practice was led and managed promoted the delivery of high-quality, person-centre care.
• The practice acted quickly to address concerns identified as part of the inspection process.

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

• Embed processes to act on and identify risks in practice. In particular those relating to risk assessments and unauthorised access to medical equipment and records.
• Continue to implement recall processes to ensure patients receive reviews of their medicines.
• Embed systems to record and review clerical errors at a practice level in order to identify practice-wide learning.
• Continue with improvements towards childhood immunisation and screening

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 Hospitals and Interim Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services.