A GP surgery has been told to improve by health watchdog the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Inspectors visited Ashwell Medical Centre, Manningham, in February and gave it the ‘requires improvement’ rating overall.

It received the same rating in the ‘are services caring?’ and ‘are services responsive?’ questions, but was judged to be good in the questions related to safety, effectiveness and leadership.

The overall rating marks a fall for the surgery, which was inspected in February 2015 and received the ‘good’ rating overall.

TOP STORIES:

Inspectors said in their report: “We rated the practice as requires improvement for providing caring services because: patient satisfaction regarding consultations and their involvement in discussions regarding their care and treatment was significantly below local and national averages. The numbers of carers identified and supported by the practice was below one per cent.”

They said the surgery was given the ‘requires improvement’ rating for responsive services because patient satisfaction regarding making and accessing appointments was “mixed”.

The report said: “Although the practice had introduced improvements to increase access to appointments these still needed to be fully embedded and reviewed for their effectiveness.”

While the surgery was told to improve, the report said: “We rated the practice as good for providing safe, effective and well-led services because: the practice had clear systems to manage risk so that safety incidents were less likely to happen.When incidents did happen, the practice learned from them and improved their processes.”

The CQC said the practice routinely reviewed the effectiveness and appropriateness of the care it provided and there was said to be a strong focus on continuous learning and improvement. Staff also said they felt supported by the practice and there was “active provision” to support patients whose first language was not English.

In a statement, Ashwell Medical Centre highlighted that it serves "one of the most challenging practice populations in the CCG and in the country" and that in addition to the challenges this presents, it has also been "defunded" by 20 per cent over the last three years.

The spokesperson said that despite this, the surgery achieves clinical outcomes which places it in the top performing practices locally and nationally and over the past two years has worked hard to improve access for patients, increasing the number of 'same day' appointments available by 44 per cent.

The spokesperson said: "In their recent inspection of Ashwell Medical Centre CQC have acknowledged the practice is safe, effective and well-led. The whole practice is extremely disappointed that CQC have heavily weighted their recent report on the outcomes of National GP Patient Satisfaction Survey (undertaken in early 2018) and rated the practice in need of improvement on this basis.

"The response rate to this four page postal survey for our practice was very low and, according to the technical guidance that accompanies the survey, too low for the report to be considered statistically robust. Other indicators of patient satisfaction (Friends and family test results, feedback gathered from the frequent patient participation events held at the practice, and in house patient surveys) have not reflected the results shown in the national survey."