We carried out a comprehensive inspection of Firdale Medical Centre on 12 March 2019. We rated the practice Good overall but Requires Improvement for providing responsive services because although there were no breaches of regulations, the practice had not adequately formally monitored patient experiences of accessing the practice to make sure improvements were made.
We also recommended that the practice should:
- Continue to ensure staff have the information they need about safeguarding concerns when booking appointments for patients.
- Monitor the revised procedures for the management of uncollected prescriptions and the security of prescriptions.
- Record all significant events on one record to enable patterns and trends and progress to be more easily identified.
- Put in place a spreadsheet to monitor safety alerts.
- Make information about support groups available on the practice website.
- Document the remit for referrals to the self-employed counsellors.
- Ensure a written agreement between the counsellor, practice and patient to clearly identify what information is to be recorded, where it is to be stored and who has access to this information.
- Ensure there is an effective system for managing verbal complaints.
At this desk based follow up inspection carried out 28 February 2020, we only focused on the areas requiring improvement and found that the provider had satisfactorily addressed these areas and therefore the practice is now rated as Good for providing responsive services.
As the issues from the previous inspection also affected all the population groups, all population groups were originally rated as requires improvement. We have now rated the practice as good for responsive care for all population groups as the issues have been addressed.
We based our judgement of the quality of care at this service on a combination of:
• information from our ongoing monitoring of data about services and
• information from the provider, patients, the public and other organisations.
Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.
Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP
Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care