A South Holland GP surgery serving more than 8,000 patients has been put into special measures following a recent inspection.
Holbeach Medical Centre was rated as being ‘inadequate’ by inspectors from the Care Quality Commission (CQC.)
“The service will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to urgent enforcement action,” says the report.
The surgery will be inspected again within six months and has a raft of improvements which need to be underway by then.
Of five key areas looked at by the inspection, three were rated inadequate; safety, responsiveness and leadership, and two require improvement; caring and effectiveness.
The overall rating is also inadequate following the visit on January 16.
The report, published this week, said recruitment procedures did not adequately protect patients; prescribing to some patients did not keep them safe; the system for dealing with patient safety and medicine alerts was not effective.
Not all staff had completed mandatory training, the surgery was not open throughout the contracted core hours and there’s no information as to what patients should do outside of hours.
“Feedback from patients through the national GP survey were generally lower than average. There was limited evidence of what the practice had done to address the concerns,” the report says.
A spokesman for the Care Commissioning Group said: “We are disappointed that Holbeach Medical Centre has been rated inadequate and subsequently placed into special measures by the CQC. Being in special measures means that the CQC has found that elements of the services the centre provides had not been to the expected standard. In this case, the failures relate to certain areas where the CQC considers the practice to be inadequate or requiring improvement.
“We are working with the practice to ensure that the areas of concern have either been resolved or are being addressed. We will continue to offer support to the practice and we will regularly review and monitor its progress.
We would like to assure patients of our commitment to commissioning the highest quality, safe care for everyone.”
The CQC report also highlighted a back log of new patient notes that had not been summarised, and no plans were in place to address the issue. The practice had also been without a registered manager since September 30, 2018, and no notification had been submitted to the CQC.
