Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice
We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Vocare House on 10, 11, 14 and 30 January 2017. The overall rating for the service was requires improvement. The full comprehensive report on the January 2017 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Vocare House on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
This inspection was an unannounced focused inspection carried out on 20 October 2017 to confirm that the service had carried out their plan to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breaches in regulations that we identified in our previous inspection in January 2017. This report covers our findings in relation to those requirements and also additional improvements made since our last inspection.
Overall the service is now rated as good.
Our key findings were as follows:
- The service’s internal online training system had been redesigned and the sample of training records we looked at showed all clinical staff had recently carried out safeguarding training.
- The staff responsible for recruitment had been integrated into the human resource support team. This team supported regional and line managers with the administrative tasks associated with recruitment. The sample of recruitment records we looked at showed references had been obtained.
- Most training had been completed. Arrangements were in place to contact GPs to request copies of training certificates where they had completed this externally to the service.
- A large amount of appraisals for non-clinical staff had been carried out over the previous six months; staff had either had a recent appraisal or had a date booked within the following two weeks.
At our previous inspection in January 2017 we said the service should continue to seek ways to improve performance on face-to-face consultations. Performance was below average; the target was for 95% of consultations to take place within set timescales. The provider had achieved between 73% and 100% for the period April to September 2016. Plans were in place to improve, which included employing prescribing pharmacists and setting up a national triage team to cover periods of high demand. At this inspection we found that performance had improved and ranged from 94.3% to 100% of consultations taking place within the relevant timescales.
Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP
Chief Inspector of General Practice