Southport GP Surgery rated inadequate and placed into special measures by the Care Quality Commission

England’s Chief Inspector of General Practice has rated Southport GP practice, Dr Halina Obuchowicz, as Inadequate and placed the practice into special measures following an inspection by the CQC in June this year.

Under CQC’s programme of inspections, all of England’s GP practices are given a rating in five key areas, are they; safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.

Dr Halina Obuchowicz was rated as Inadequate for safe, and well-led domains, and Requires Improvement for effective, caring and responsive domains. The services provided by the practice have been rated as Inadequate overall.

Alison Holbourn, Deputy Chief Inspector of General Practice at CQC said:

“We found that people registered with Dr Halina Obuchowicz  aren’t getting the high quality care which everyone should expect to receive from their GP practice.

“We found a practice that should have been better at communicating significant events to staff to avoid them from happening again, and to drive up the quality of care being provided.

“We were also concerned that there was little evidence to support whether there were measures in place to monitor the use of prescription pads and not all recruitment checks had been completed for staff.

“I do not believe that the practice is likely to resolve its challenges without external support; placing the practice in to special measures ensures that action will be taken to improve the quality of care for patients.”

A full report of this inspection has been published on the CQC website at: http://www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-497450543.

Some of the areas where CQC have told the practice they must improve:

• They should have effective communications systems in place for sharing of alerts, updates and any findings from investigations.
• They should ensure all recruitment checks are in place for all staff.
• The practice should ensure there is a governance system in place to monitor the distribution and use of prescription pads
• Records relating the care and treatment of each person using the service should be complete, legible, indelible, accurate and up to date, with no undue delays in adding and filing information. This includes addressing the backlog of patient note summarising.
• They should have systems and processes established to ensure that feedback provided by patients is used to continually evaluate and improve the service.

The service will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action. Where necessary, another inspection will be conducted within a further six months, and if there is not enough improvement we will move to close the service by adopting our proposal to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.

Patients registered with the practices being placed into special measures should be aware that a package of support is offered by NHS England and the Royal College of GPs to ensure that there are no immediate risks to patient safety at these GP practices whilst improvements are being made.