The Hamilton Practice

Updated 17 February 2020

The Hamilton practice is located in Harlow, Essex and provides GP services to approximately 10,800 patients who live in the locality. The list size increased by 1000 patients in April 2018 when a neighbouring practice closed. It is situated in a shared purpose built medical centre used by another GP practice. It is situated within the West Essex Clinical Commissioning Group.

The practice is situated in the fifth most deprived area of England. Income deprivation affecting children is 23.73%, which is higher that the CCG average of 14.8% and England average of 19.9%. The life expectancy of men and women is lower than the CCG average: the male life expectancy is 78 years compared to the CCG average of 80.3 years and the female life expectancy is 82.7 years, compared to the CCG average of 84.1 years.

The provider is formed of four partners who are supported by three salaried doctors and a practice manager. There are three practice nurses and a healthcare assistant employed at the practice. The Hamilton Practice is a training practice for GPs. At the time of our inspection, there were four registrars employed.

Updated 17 February 2020

We carried out an announced focused inspection at The Hamilton Practice on 17 January 2020. This was due to the length of time since the last inspection. Following our review of the information available to us, including information provided by the practice, we focused our inspection on the following key questions:

• Is the practice effective?
• Is the practice well-led?

We based our judgement of the quality of care at this service on a combination of:

• what we found when we inspected
• information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services and
• information from the provider, patients, the public and other organisations.

We have rated this practice as good overall and good for all population groups.

We found that:

• The practice was performing in line with or better than average in respect of prescribing, GP patient survey and QOF data.
• Patient feedback was reviewed and used to drive improvement.
• The practice was performing below target for cervical screening indicators. Some improvements had been made.
• There were proactive arrangements to work with other healthcare professionals and providers.
• Patient feedback was positive and was used to drive improvement; however, there was no patient participation group.

The areas where the practice should make improvement are:

• Continue to review and improve uptake of cervical screening.
• Continue to take steps to form a patient participation group.

We identified one area of outstanding practice:

• The practice worked with another practice to support two local care homes and make improvements to patient’s health, care and treatment, the management of medicines and to reduce the frequency of home visits. They organised multi-disciplinary meetings with healthcare professionals and looked at ways of encouraging shared learning; this included representatives of the care homes, the CCG pharmacist, emergency care practitioner, care home practitioner and community matron. The practice had identified improvements as a result of the coordinated meetings: requests for home visits reduced from 14 to six in December. Ad-hoc prescription requests had stopped, with all patients transferred to a monthly prescribing regime.