We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Dr Sinha and Partners, Old Leake Medical Centre on 25 October 2018 as part of our inspection programme. Our inspection team was led by a CQC inspector and included a GP specialist advisor and a practice manager specialist advisor.

Our judgement of the quality of care at this service is based on a combination of what we found when we inspected, information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services and information from the provider, patients, the public and other organisations.

I have rated this practice as good overall.

This means that:

• People were protected from avoidable harm and abuse and that legal requirements were met.
• Patients had good outcomes because they received effective care and treatment that met their needs.
• Patients were supported, treated with dignity and respect and were involved as partners in their care.
• People’s needs were met by the way in which services were organised and delivered.
• The leadership, governance and culture of the practice promoted the delivery of high quality person-centred care.

Whilst we found no breaches of regulations, the provider should:

• Review the process for sharing learning from serious incidents and complaints with staff.
• Review the process for ensuring that emergency medicines are always readily available.
• Review the process for monitoring the temperatures of dispensary refrigerators used to store some medicines.
• Continue to review telephone access to the practice.
• Monitor and review the turnaround time to dispense repeat prescriptions.

Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.

Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGPChief Inspector of General Practice

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We inspected this service on 1 October 2014 as part of our new comprehensive inspection programme. This provider had not been inspected before and that was why we included them.

The overall rating for this service is good. We found the practice to be good in the effective, caring and well-led domains and good in the safe and responsive domains. We found the practice provided good care to older people, people with long term conditions and people in vulnerable circumstances, families, children and young people, working age people and people experiencing poor mental health

Our key findings were as follows:

• Patients were kept safe because there were arrangements in place for staff to report and learn from key safety risks. The practice had a system in place for reporting, recording and monitoring significant events over time.

• The practice recognised from the recent practice survey carried out by the Patient Participation Group that patients were concerned that they could not hear in the waiting room if a prescription was ready for collection from reception. As a result a loudspeaker system was installed.

• There were systems in place to keep patients safe from the risk and spread of infection. Systems were in place to monitor and make required improvements.

• Evidence we reviewed demonstrated that the majority of patients were satisfied with how they were treated and that this was with compassion, dignity and respect. It also demonstrated that the GPs were good at listening to patients and gave them enough time.

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

The provider should:

• Improve the low performance for the treatment of low blood pressure in hypertension and diabetes.

• Improve the documentation of alcohol consumption in patients with severe mental illness.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice