Birtley Medical Group

Updated 21 December 2023

Birtley Medical Group is located at Durham Road, Birtley, Tyne and Wear, DH3 2QT.

The provider is registered to deliver the regulated activities of diagnostic and screening procedures; maternity and midwifery services; treatment of disease, disorder or injury; and surgical procedures.

The practice is situated within the NHS Northeast and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) and delivers a General Medical Services contract (GMS) to a patient population around 15,500 patients. This is part of a contract held with NHS England. The practice is part of a wider Primary Care Network (PCN) which is Central Gateshead.

Information published by 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.

The practice is open between 7am to 6pm weekdays except Wednesday when they are open 7am to 8pm.

Out of hours services are provided by 111 and extended access appointments are provided by a local provider, Community Based Care (CBC) where late evening appointments are available until 10pm and weekend appointments are available 9am to 5pm.

Updated 21 December 2023

We carried out a targeted assessment of Birtley Medical Group in relation to the responsive key question. This assessment was carried out on 5 December 2023 without a site visit. Overall, the practice is rated as Good. We rated the key question of responsive as Requires improvement.

Safe - Good

Effective – Good

Caring - Good

Responsive – Requires improvement

Well-led – Good

The full reports for previous inspections can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for the

Birtley Medical Group on our website at www.cqc.org.uk

Why we carried out this review.

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 remotely.

This included:

• Conducting staff interviews using video conferencing.
• Requesting evidence from the provider

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:

• 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.
• The effect of these efforts are not yet reflected in patient feedback. Patient feedback was that they could not always access care and treatment in a timely way. Patients were dissatisfied with the arrangements for getting through to the practice by phone and their experience of obtaining an appointment.

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

• Continue with their plan of responding to patient concerns/feedback about access and their experience of making an appointment with an aim to improve patient experience.

​​​​​​​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