Archived: Newton Medical Centre

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Newton Medical Centre on 26 August 2015. 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 to report incidents and near misses. Information about safety was recorded, monitored, appropriately reviewed and addressed.
• Risks to patients were assessed and well managed.
• Patients’ needs were assessed and care was planned and delivered following best practice guidance. Staff had received training appropriate to their roles and any further training needs had been identified and planned.
• Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment.
• Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand.
• The practice had good facilities and was well equipped to treat patients and meet their needs.
• There was a clear leadership structure and staff felt supported by management. The practice proactively sought feedback from staff and patients, which it acted on.

We saw one area of outstanding practice:

• The practice provided an individualised service to patients with suspected heart conditions. Patients were referred to a cardiologist to support early diagnosis and treatment this service was funded by the practice.
• The practice had a system in place that allocated specific areas for administration staff to take the lead, for example there was a cancer care lead. The designated member of staff would ring patients and ask if the practice could offer any further support either through their own services or by accessing other services. If the patient expressed that they felt unwell this information was shared with a clinician to follow up.
• The practice staff had undertaken dementia training and had become ‘Dementia Friends’ (this is an Alzheimer’s Society initiative to support people to learns a little bit more about what it's like to live with dementia and then turns that understanding into action to support people living with dementia to live well). The members of the Patient Participation Group had also been given the opportunity to undertake this training.
• The practice had a system in place to ensure that a celebratory card was sent to new parents included with the card was an early years fact sheet that provided parents with a schedule of when immunisation would be carried out. It also provided information about the types of healthcare checks that would be made to ensure their baby was healthy and receiving the appropriate healthcare support.

• The practice was instrumental in providing a guide for parents and carers of children aged birth to five years. This guide provided information and guidance to manage general welfare, the first few months such as teething issues and childhood illnesses. This guide had been very successful and had been shared by the CCG with all practices in the area.

There were areas where the provider should make improvements.

Importantly the provider should:

• Ensure that the practice website contains sufficient health promotion information for patients.

Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP 

Chief Inspector of General Practice