Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Market Surgery on 15 April 2016. Overall the practice is rated as good.

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

• Staff understood and fulfilled their responsibilities to raise concerns and report incidents and near misses. All opportunities for learning from internal and external incidents were maximised. The practice was proactive in ensuring that all staff had the opportunity to join meetings and had ownership of changes that resulted.

• Feedback from patients about their care was consistently positive. Patient feedback scores from the NHS GP Survey, the Friends, and Family Test (FFT) and from our own comments cards was extremely positive about the practice. Patients expressed high satisfaction levels with the service citing attentive and caring staff. 95% of patients using the FFT would recommend the practice.

• The practice worked closely with other organisations and with the local community in planning how services were provided to ensure that they met patients’ needs. For example, the practice provided care to several local residential and nursing home. Some of these homes were for specific groups of patients, (for patients with learning disabilities or who were experiencing poor mental health), the practice was proactive when working with the staff, and carers to ensure those patients’ needs were met.

• The practice actively reviewed complaints and how they were managed and responded to, and made improvements as a result.

• The practice had strong and visible clinical and managerial leadership and governance arrangements.

We saw an area of outstanding practice including:

• The practice team worked in a well-co-ordinated manner to enable end-of-life care to take place at home. This was evidenced by the fact that 27% of the practice's patients died in hospital compared to a national average of 50%. Involvement in end-of-life care had provided very valuable training for all the GPs including the trainee GPs and had enabled them to gain confidence in managing complex cases.

However there was an area of practice where the provider could and should make an improvement:

• Request that the patient or their representative sign for the collection of controlled drugs.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice