Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

Compass House Medical Centre was inspected on 12 May 2015. This was a comprehensive inspection.

Overall the practice is rated as outstanding.

Specifically the practice is rated as outstanding for providing responsive and well led services, and good for providing safe, caring and effective care. The practice is rated as outstanding for the care of families, people with long term conditions, and good for the population groups of older people, working age people, vulnerable people, people with mental health issues including dementia.

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

• Patients were protected by a strong comprehensive safety system, and a focus on openness, transparency and learning when things went wrong.

• Patients reported having good access to appointments at the practice and liked having a named GP which improved their continuity of care

• The practice valued feedback from patients and acted upon this and feedback from patients about their care and treatment was consistently positive

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

The practice had a young person friendly clinic providing easy access to anonymous chlamydia screening and a condom card scheme called the “C Card Scheme”, a confidential service which enabled patients aged 13-24 years old to get free condoms as well as sexual health information and advice. The local authority informed us that this scheme had achieved a positive impact, decreasing sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy rates within Torbay.

The practice nominated an executive GP partner on a rotational basis every three years to lead the practice and drive continuous improvement.

The practice carried out virtual clinics for patients with diabetes to support less mobile patients and to reduce patient’s frequency of visits to the practice and also to prevent unnecessary attendance in secondary care.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice

We reviewed the information available to us about Compass House Medical Centres on 24 April 2019. We did not find evidence of significant changes to the quality of service being provided since the last inspection. As a result, we decided not to inspect the surgery at this time. We will continue to monitor this information about this service throughout the year and may inspect the surgery when we see evidence of potential changes.