The Oakley Partnership

Updated 16 July 2019

The Oakley Partnership is a private general medical practice offering a range of private services to patients such as private GP consultations and medical examinations, child and adult immunisations, travel vaccinations, weight loss injections, alcohol dependency treatment, bio-identical hormone therapy and private health screening across a range of areas.

The service is delivered from a purpose build surgery based at 52 Bishops Way, Sutton Coldfield

West Midlands, B74 4XS. Our inspection team was led by a CQC lead inspector who visited the service with a nurse specialist advisor on 18 June 2019. As the single handed doctor and provider was not available on the day of our inspection visit a CQC National Clinical Advisor undertook a telephone interview with them on 24 June 2019 to conclude the inspection.

The service is registered to provide the regulated activities of Diagnostic and screening procedures and the Treatment of disease, disorder or injury from this location.

The practice is open for appointments Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. Occasionally, Saturday appointments are also available between 9am and 1pm; these are booked on an intermittent basis based on capacity and demand needs. The practice is not required to offer an out of hours service. Patients who need medical assistance out of operating hours are requested to seek assistance from alternative services such as the NHS 111 telephone service or accident and emergency.

The clinical team includes a single handed doctor (male) a registered practice nurse who is also a nurse prescriber (female). The doctor (provider) has a practice manager who helps to manage the service and is a partner in the business also. In addition, the service employs a team of three support staff with reception and administration roles.

Before our inspection we reviewed a range of information about the service, this included patient feedback from the public domain, information from the providers website and the providers CQC information return. As part of our inspection we:

• Looked at the systems in place for the running of the service
• Explored how clinical decisions were made
• Viewed a sample of key policies and procedures
• Spoke with a range of staff

• Looked at a random selection of patient reports
• Made observations of the environment and infection control measures
• Reviewed patient feedback including CQC comment cards

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we always ask the following five questions:

• Is it safe?
• Is it effective?
• Is it caring?
• Is it responsive to people’s needs?
• Is it well-led?

These questions therefore formed the framework for the areas we looked at during the inspection.

Updated 16 July 2019

This service is rated as Good overall.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection of The Oakley Partnership as part of our inspection programme.

The Oakley Partnership is a private general medical practice which offers a range of private services to patients such as private GP consultations and medical examinations, child and adult immunisations, weight loss injections, alcohol dependency treatment. They also provide Bio Identical Hormone Therapy and private health screening across a range of areas including testing for HIV, HepB and other sexually transmitted infections and diseases (STI’s and STD’s) through the services private clinical partner: Better2Know. The practice also offers a full travel consultation and vaccination service and is a MASTA (Medical Advisory Service for Travellers Abroad) travel clinic as well as a National Travel Health Network and Centre (NaTHNac) approved Yellow Fever Vaccination Centre.

The registered manager is the single handed doctor and provider for the service. A registered manager is a person who is registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

Patient feedback and completed CQC comment cards were very positive about the service. The service was described as efficient and staff were described as friendly, professional. Patients noted that they were happy with the quality of care received.

Our key findings were:

• The service had processes and systems in place to keep patients safe. There were safe and effective recruitment procedures to ensure staff were suitable for their role.
• The systems and arrangements for managing medicines, including vaccines, emergency medicines and equipment minimised risks.
• There was evidence which demonstrated that the service carried out assessments and treatment in line with relevant and current evidence based guidance and standards, across all services provided.
• We saw that accurate records were kept of medicines administered to patients. Where unlicensed off-label medicines were used, patients were fully informed and gave valid consent.
• Clinicians made appropriate and timely referrals in line with protocols and up to date evidence-based guidance.
• Staff treated patients with kindness, respect and compassion. Feedback from patients was positive with regards to access to appointments, quality of care and the effectiveness of the services provided.
• Staff had the skills, knowledge and experience to carry out their roles. Staff we spoke with were passionate about their work and demonstrated a patient centred approach.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Consider adding to existing mandatory training modules to support non-clinical staff in being able to identify and manage patients with severe infections, such as for sepsis.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGPChief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care