Surgery Statement

BACK TO MAIN INDEX

Our practice has suffered a catastrophic failure of management and governance, the extent of which was not apparent until January this year. Dr Simon Desert is, in the interim, working as Managing Partner with reduced clinical commitment and Mrs Julie Bates as acting Practice Manager.

Our CQC inspection was anticipated following our self-notification to all NHS bodies of our challenges, but coming within less than four months it is an assessment of work required rather than completed. We had highlighted our areas of concern to the inspection team and these were largely confirmed by audits carried out prior to their visit. Deficits where apparent are attributable to the governance of our work and not the skill, motivation or application of our people. The current team are making progress building back systems that will facilitate our work. Significant pressure persists in an under-funded health and social care system that is struggling to meet the standards of care to which we all aspire.

The following developments at Castlegate and Derwent Surgery have been initiated:

1. Practice Governance and Assurance

A new partnership board reporting to the whole practice with staff and patient representation (via patient participation group) and request for assurance/attendance to the board from PCN (Primary Care Network), ICB (Integrated Care Board), NHSE (NHS England) and CQC (Care Quality Commission)

2. Prescribing and Medicines Management

We have commenced an evaluation of the practice’s prescribing systems and the Patient Participation Group will be conducting as patient survey very shortly. We have already provided a new prescription query line and will be moving away from telephone answer messages to managing treatment requests directly. We will then meet with our partner organisations to plan how we can improve our systems further.

3. Training

The practice has made improvements to the training recording systems and is working with our local training providers to complete training for staff newly promoted to roles vacated by retirement

4. Significant Events and Complaints management

The practice has implemented a new IT based system to facilitate incident reporting and management, the maintenance of a risk register and assimilation of learning

Published: Jul 11, 2023