Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We inspected Dr Aamer Khan, The City Medical Practice, on the 11th November 2014 as part of our new comprehensive inspection programme. We have rated the practice as good.

Our key findings were as follows:

• The practice offered proactive, personalised care to meet the needs of the older people in its population.

• An advanced nurse practitioner had been recruited to improve the management of long term conditions.

• The practice was proactive in monitoring and recalling children for scheduled immunisations.

• Women were given advice and information to encourage them to participate in cervical screening programmes.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

• The practice had a register of patients with complex care needs and a relatively high use of other health and social care services. These patients were offered priority access to appointments and advice so as to minimise the use of emergency services.

• The practice had employed staff with both clinical expertise and language skills appropriate for the predominantly Asian and East European population. Eleven different languages were spoken by the staff and health advice information was available in Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and English.

• One of the GPs had completed additional training in psychiatry and the practice liaised with mental health support workers to increase the number of patients with mental health concerns who received physical health checks.

However, there were also areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.

The provider should:

• Put in place procedures to check that patients referred for a hospital appointment had been followed up and an appointment arranged.

• Update the practice complaints procedure to include the correct contact details for the Care Quality Commission and Parliamentary and Health Ombudsman.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP)

Chief Inspector of General Practice

Our inspection on 17 October 2013 found the provider had not carried out appropriate recruitment checks. Following the inspection the provider wrote to us and told us they would take action to ensure they were compliant with these essential standards.

At this inspection we found that improvements had been made, the provider had reviewed their policies and procedures. These documents provided staff with the actions they must take to ensure only suitable staff were employed at the practice.

We observed staff speaking with people on the telephone and in person. We saw staff were friendly and polite and offered choices to patients. We found that people who used the service were treated with dignity and respect. We spoke with two people who used the service. One person said "it's very clean," and another person said "clean and tidy".

People who used the service were protected against the risk of abuse. Staff received training in abuse awareness and protecting children and vulnerable adults. The policies and procedures were available to all staff in relation to safeguarding.

We found people were protected from the risk of infection as treatment was delivered in a clean and hygienic environment.

There was an effective complaints system in place. Complaints people made were responded to appropriately.

However we found there was no recruitment and selection processes in place and there was not a policy for the recruitment and selection of personnel.

We reviewed the information available to us about Dr Aamer Khan on 8 May 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.