Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at 70 Norwood Road , also known as Southall Medical Centre, on 8 January 2015. The inspection took place over one day and was undertaken by a Lead inspector, a GP Specialist Advisor and a Practice Manager Specialist Advisor. We looked at care records, spoke with patients, members of the patient participation group (PPG) and staff including the management team.

Overall the practice is rated as ‘Good.’

We found the practice to be good for providing safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led services. It was good for providing services for older people; people with long term conditions; families, children and young people; working age people (including those recently retired and students), people whose circumstances make them vulnerable and people experiencing poor mental health.

Our key findings across all the areas we inspected were as follows:

• Systems including incident reporting protocols, safeguarding measures and infection control procedures were in place to keep patients safe.

• Staff were appropriately qualified to deliver effective care and treatment in line with professional guidelines.
• Patients said that staff were welcoming, caring and treated them with dignity and respect and the GPs involved them in decisions about their treatment and care.

• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and from the Patient Participation Group (PPG). Most patients were satisfied with access to the service and the appointment system. However, some patients fed back that the practice’s opening hours could be improved.

There were areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

Importantly, the provider should:

• Arrange for the Health Care Assistant to be trained to Level 2 for safeguarding children.

• Ensure availability of an automated external defibrillator (AED) or undertake a risk assessment if a decision is made to not have an AED on-site.
• Record the vaccine fridge temperatures for the minimum and maximum temperatures in addition to the actual temperature.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice