We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Whitley Road Medical Centre on 3 June 2015

Overall the practice is rated as good. We found the practice to be outstanding for providing effective services and good for providing safe, well led, caring and responsive services.

Our key findings 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.

• Risks to patients were assessed and well managed.

• Patients’ needs were assessed and care was planned and delivered after considering best practice guidance. Staff had received training appropriate to their roles and any further training needs had been identified and planned.

• Open access surgeries operated each morning until 10.30am. All patients who arrived at the surgery during this time period were seen by a GP.

• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment. Information was provided to help patients understand the care available to them.

• The practice implemented suggestions for improvements and made changes to the way it delivered services as a consequence of feedback from patients and it was trying to establish an effective Patient Participation Group (PPG).

• The practice had a clear vision which had quality and safety as its top priority. High standards were promoted and owned by all practice staff with evidence of supportive team working across all roles.

We also saw areas of outstanding practice:

• The practice was committed and supportive to improving palliative care services to its patients and was working very closely with the palliative care teams to make sure patients received appropriate end of life care.

• The practice actively screened patient blood test results to identify those that were pre-diabetic. Those identified were invited in to an appointment to discuss the risk of developing diabetes and review lifestyle choices to mitigate this risk.

• The practice initiated insulin therapy on-site, instead of having to attend the local hospital.

• The practice was supporting patients with ‘Self Care’ which is an initiative to build confidence and knowledge for patients to manage their own minor ailments and so reduce the frequency of appointments with a GP.

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

Importantly the provider should:

• Ensure a formalised plan of action to monitor, review and reduce the rate of prescribing hypnotics if appropriate is recorded and implemented.

• Ensure a standardised approach to recording written consent from patients before any minor surgery procedure is undertaken.

Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP) 

Chief Inspector of General Practice

We reviewed the information available to us about Whitley Road Medical Centre on 16 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.