England’s Chief Inspector of General Practice has rated the GP Practice Dr Chidananda Barua, Bolton as Inadequate and placed the practice into special measures following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
Under CQC’s programme of inspections, all of England’s GP Practices are given a rating in five key areas, are they; safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led.
Dr Chidananda Barua’s Practice was rated as Inadequate for safe and well-led, Requires Improvement for effective and caring, and Good for responsive. The services provided by the Practice have been rated as Inadequate overall.
Alison Holbourn, Deputy Chief Inspector of General Practice at CQC said:
“We found that people registered with Dr Chidananda Barua’s Practice aren’t getting the high quality care which everyone should expect to receive from their GP Practice.
“We found patients were at risk of harm because systems and processes were not good enough to keep them safe. For example appropriate recruitment checks were not always undertaken and staff didn’t receive appropriate safeguarding training, which meant vulnerable patients were at risk.
“We were also concerned that care plans for patients were not a priority. We found that care plans hadn’t been produced for six of the eight patients on the palliative care register.
“I do not believe that the practice is likely to resolve its challenges without external support; placing the practice in to special measures ensures that action will be taken to improve the quality of care for patients ”
A full report of this inspection has been published.
Some of the areas where CQC have told the practice they must improve are:
- Ensure that effective systems are in place to communicate, analyse and learn from incidents.
- Ensure all staff have undertaken safeguarding training
- Address the finding that there was no system in place to record verbal complaint and comments made.
- Address the finding that there was no plan of how to improve GP survey results.
- Ensure infection control systems are appropriately managed.
The service will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action. Where necessary, another inspection will be conducted within a further six months, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to close the service by adopting our proposal to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.
Patients registered with the practices being placed into special measures should be aware that a package of support is offered by NHS England and the Royal College of GPs to ensure that there are no immediate risks to patient safety at these GP practices whilst improvements are being made.
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For further information please contact CQC Regional Communications Officer Kerri James on 07464 92 9966 or kerri.james@cqc.org.uk.
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