Warley Medical Centre

Updated 20 March 2024

Warley Medical Centre is located in Oldbury at:

Ambrose House

Kingsway

Oldbury

B68 0RT

The provider is registered with CQC to deliver the Regulated Activities; diagnostic and screening procedures, maternity and midwifery services, treatment of disease, disorder or injury, surgical procedures and family planning.

The practice is situated within the Black Country Integrated Care Board (ICB) and delivers General Medical Services (GMS) to a patient population of about 11,000. This is part of a contract held with NHS England.

Information published by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the fourth lowest decile (four of 10). The lower the decile, the more deprived the practice population is relative to others.

According to the latest available data, the ethnic make-up of the practice area is 17% Asian, 67.8% White, 6.8% Black, 5% Mixed, and 3.3% Other.

There is a team of eight GPs, three nurses who provide nurse led clinics, a health care assistant, a medicines manager, two medical management officers, two pharmacists and two counsellors. The practice is also supported by a team of reception/administration staff. The practice manager provides overall managerial oversight of the practice with support from an assistant practice manager.

The practice is open between 8am to 6:30pm Monday to Friday. The practice offers a range of appointment types including book on the day, telephone/face to face consultations, video calls and advance appointments.

Extended access is appointments are available late evenings and weekends. Out of hours services are provided by Portway Extended Hours.

Updated 20 March 2024

We undertook a targeted assessment of the responsive key question at Warley Medical Centre. The rating for the responsive key question is Requires Improvement. As the other domains were not reviewed during this assessment, the other ratings of good will be carried forward from the previous inspection and the overall rating of the service will remain Good.

Safe - Not inspected, rating of Good carried forward from previous inspection

Effective - Not inspected, rating of Good carried forward from previous inspection

Caring - Not inspected, rating of Good carried forward from previous inspection

Responsive - Requires Improvement

Well-led - Not inspected, rating of Good carried forward from previous inspection

The full reports for previous inspections can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Warley Medical Centre on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

Why we carried out this assessment

We carried out a targeted assessment of the responsive key question. Targeted assessments enable us to focus on certain key questions to explore particular aspects of care.

How we carried out the assessment

• This assessment was carried out without a site visit.
• Conducted staff interviews using video conferencing system.
• Requesting evidence from the provider and reviewing their appointment system.

Our findings

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

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

We found that:

• Patients received care and treatment that met their needs.
• Patients could not always access care and treatment in a timely way.
• The National GP Patient Survey results related to patient access were below the national average, but the provider in partnership with the PPG and ICB were improving access arrangements. However, this needed further time to embed the actions they had taken.
• The provider had in place a complaints process which enabled patients to raise concerns, which the provider acted on and used to improve the service.
• We found while patients had positive comments as to their experience in accessing a GP, there were also some negative comments.

Whilst we found no breaches of the regulations, the provider should:

Continue to identify ways to improve patient satisfaction in relation to access to the practice by phone and the appointment system.

Details of our findings and the evidence supporting our ratings are set out in the evidence tables.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Health Care