The Allum Medical Centre

Updated 27 February 2024

The Allum Medical Centre is located at Fairlop Road, Leytonstone, London, E11 1BN.

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

The practice is situated within the NHS North East London Integrated Care Board (ICB) and delivers Personal Medical Services (PMS) to a patient population of about 14,000. This is part of a contract held with NHS England.

The practice is part of a wider network of GP practices.

Information published by Office for Health Improvement and Disparities shows that deprivation within the practice population group is in the fifth decile (5 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 25% Asian, 50% White, 14% Black, 6% Mixed, and 5% Other.

The practice is open between 8 am to 6.30 pm Monday to Friday. The practice offers a range of appointment types including book on the day, telephone consultations and advance appointments.

Extended access is provided including late evening and Saturday appointments.

Updated 27 February 2024

We carried out an announced assessment of The Allum Medical Centre on 19 January 2024. The assessment focused on the responsive key question.

Following our previous inspection on 22 October 2019 the practice was rated good for the responsive key question and good overall. The full reports for previous inspections can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for The Allum Medical Centre on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

The practice continues to be rated as good overall as this was the rating given at the last comprehensive inspection. However, we have now rated the responsive key question as requires improvement as a result of the findings of this focused assessment.

Safe - Good

Effective – Good

Caring – Good

Responsive – Requires improvement

Well-led - Good

Why we carried out this assessment

We carried out this assessment as part of our work to understand how practices are working to try to meet demand for access and to better understand the experiences of people who use services and providers. We recognise the work that GP practices have been engaged in to continue to provide safe, quality care to the people they serve. We know colleagues are doing this while demand for general practice remains exceptionally high, with more appointments being provided than ever. In this challenging context, access to general practice remains a concern for people. Our strategy makes a commitment to deliver regulation driven by people’s needs and experiences of care. These assessments of the responsive key question include looking at what practices are doing innovatively to improve patient access to primary care and sharing this information to drive improvement.

How we carried out the assessment

This assessment was carried out remotely. It did not include a site visit.

The process included:

• Conducting an interview with the provider and members of staff using video conferencing.
• Reviewing patient feedback from a range of sources
• Requesting evidence from the provider
• Reviewing data we hold about the service

Our findings

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 found that:

• The provider established an award-winning Specialist Diabetes Service which improved outcomes for patients.

• Complaints were satisfactorily handled in a timely manner and were used to drive improvement.

• According to the National GP Patient Survey results the practice had continued to perform below national ‘access’ averages for all key indicators. Since the last inspection in 2019, patient satisfaction has been on a downward trend in all of the key indicators. Although there has been an upward trend since 2022 in respect of patient satisfaction with appointment times.

• During the assessment process, the provider highlighted the efforts they are making or are planning to make to improve the responsiveness of the service for their patient population. A recent in-house patient survey was conducted to monitor the impact of these efforts and indicated positive results. The effect of these efforts, however, are not yet reflected in the most recent National GP Patient Survey results.

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

• Continue to identify ways of improving patient satisfaction in relation to access to appointments.

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