England’s Chief Inspector of General Practice has rated Greenbank Surgery 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. Greenbank Surgery was rated as Inadequate for safe, effective, caring, and well-led, and Requires Improvement in responsive. The services provided by Greenbank Surgery have been rated as Inadequate overall.
Dr Janet Williamson, Deputy Chief Inspector of General Practice at CQC said:
“It’s unacceptable that people registered with Greenbank Surgery aren’t getting the high quality care which everyone is entitled to receive from their GP.
“We found there were no systems and processes in place to keep patients safe, for example appropriate recruitment checks on staff had not been undertaken before they started working at Greenbank.
“We were also very concerned that not all staff, including GP partners, were clear about the reporting and sharing of incidents, near misses or concerns. This meant that Greenbank Surgery wasn’t taking the opportunity to learn from mistakes so the service was not continuously improving.
“I do not believe that the practice is likely to resolve its challenges without external support. This is why we are placing the practice into special measures.”
A full report of this inspection has been published today.
Some of the areas where CQC have told Greenbank Surgery they must improve are:
- Ensuring patients are always treated with dignity and respect.
- Actively seek the view of patients about the quality of the care and treatment that they receive.
- Ensure people are aware of how to complain about the service, and make sure they learn from any complaints that are submitted.
- The provider must ensure all staff have received appropriate clinical and mandatory training. A record must be kept of this training and it must be monitored.
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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