Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice
This is the report from our inspection of Dr M Flynn’s Practice (Sefton Park Medical Centre). Dr M Flynn’s Practice is registered with the Care Quality Commission to provide primary care services. We undertook a planned, comprehensive inspection on the 9 April 2015 at Dr M Flynn’s Practice. We reviewed information we held about the services and spoke with patients, GPs, and staff.
Overall the practice is rated as good.
Our key findings were as follows:
• There were systems in place to mitigate safety risks such as safeguarding. Serious events were analysed and individual clinicians identified learning outcomes to improve their practice. The premises were clean and tidy. Systems were in place to ensure medication including vaccines were appropriately stored and in date.
• Patients had their needs assessed in line with current guidance and the practice had a holistic approach to patient care.
• Feedback from patients and observations throughout our inspection highlighted the staff were kind, caring and helpful.
• The practice was responsive and acted on patient complaints and feedback.
• The staff worked well together as a team.
We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:
- The practice encouraged community services to engage with the practice and this had resulted in coffee mornings being arranged in the waiting area to highlight services and facilities available to patients. This supported patients to access information and other services in one location that they were confident accessing.
- The practice offered support through shared care agreements for those patients who had addiction issues. The practice also ran joint clinics with a drug advisor to ensure patients received the correct medication, support and advice. The practice had also employed a psychologist to support patients with addiction issues. This joined up approach supported patients with addiction issues to access a range of services in one location.
- The practice offered health care checks and continuing care and treatment for patients who were seeking asylum. The practice proactively engaged with an interpreter service to ensure interpreters as much as possible were present during consultations.
- The practice had offered to financial support to staff to learn a second language to support those patients whose first language was not English.
However, there were also areas of practice where the provider needs to make improvements.
Importantly, the provider must:
- Ensure recruitment arrangements include all necessary employment checks for all staff.
In addition the provider should:
- Ensure there is a system in place to support the practice wide dissemination of learning outcomes and actions from significant events investigations and analysis.
- Ensure a Legionnaires Disease risk assessment is carried out to maintain the health and safety of patients and staff.
Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP)
Chief Inspector of General Practice