Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice
When we visited Harcourt Medical Centre on 31 August 2016 to
carry out a comprehensive inspection, we found the practice was not compliant
with the regulation relating to receiving and acting on complaints. Overall the
practice was rated as good.
We found the practice required improvement for the provision of responsive
services, because the complaints policy did not meet the recognised guidance
and contractual obligations for GPs in England. Letters sent to patients in
response to their complaint did not include information about how to escalate
the complaint if they were not satisfied.
We also said
the practice should:
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Develop and adopt a significant events policy.
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Improve their identification of carers.
-
Improve the accessibility of policies and procedures to all
staff.
Following the inspection the provider sent us an action plan
that set out the changes they would make and subsequently supplied information
to confirm they had completed the actions.
This focused desk-based inspection was undertaken to ensure that
the practice was meeting the regulation previously breached. For this reason we
have only rated the location for the key questions to which this related. This
report should be read in conjunction with the full report of our inspection on 31
August 2016, which can be found on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
We found the practice had made improvements since our last
inspection. The information we received enabled us to find the practice was
meeting the regulation that it had previously breached.
Specifically Harcourt Medical Centre:
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Had reviewed and revised their complaints policy and it now met
the recognised guidance and contractual obligations for GPs in England.
-
Letters sent to patients were clear, gave an apology, a summary
and included information about how to escalate the complaint if they were not
satisfied.
-
Had developed and adopted an appropriate significant events
policy.
-
Showed us evidence that their actions to improve the
identification of carers had resulted in more carers being identified. Since our inspection in August 2016 the number
identified had risen from 64 (0.7% of practice list) to 153 which is 1.3% of
the practice list.
-
Had reviewed the accessibility of their policies and procedures,
and had improved staff access to these documents by putting them onto a shared
computer drive which could be accessed by all staff from their computer
desktop.
Professor Steve Field (CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP)
Chief Inspector of General Practice