By Anne North

The St Petroc doctors’ surgery at St Columb has been given six months to improve or face closure, after the Care Quality Commission ruled it is unsafe.

The group of doctors serve nearly 17,000 patients.  Its main surgeries are at Padstow and St Columb Major.  There are branch surgeries at St Merryn and St Columb Road.

Recording an overall verdict of “inadequate” the CQC said the practice scored particularly poorly on safety and leadership.  “Effectiveness” and “responsiveness” were found to “need improvement” but staff had a “caring” rating of “good.”

The group is contracted by the Kernow Integrated Care Board on behalf of the NHS.

Dr Sean O’Kelly, CQC chief inspector of hospitals, said:  “I am placing this service in special measures. Services placed in special measures will be inspected again within six months.

“If insufficient improvements have been made such that there remains a rating of inadequate for any population group, key question or overall, we will take action in line with our enforcement procedures to begin the process of preventing the provider from operating the service.

“This will lead to cancelling their registration or to varying the terms of their registration within six months if they do not improve.  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.”

The main findings from the CQC report were:

• The practice did not have clear systems, practices and processes to keep people safe and safeguarded from abuse. Not all processes for the safe recruitment of staff were formalised and recorded and mandatory staff training was not up to date for all clinical and non-clinical staff.

• The management of documents relating to care and treatment was not managed in a timely manner and the system for patient records waiting for summarisation was unclear to staff and therefore, the process to access to records urgently was not clear. There were some delays in processing patient correspondence records and unclear systems to ensure urgent referrals were actioned.
• Safety systems and risk management was not embedded to ensure that environmental risks were well managed.
• The procedures and systems relating to medicine management had not been consistently followed to ensure the security of prescriptions and safe management of all emergency equipment.
• Patients had not received effective care and treatment that met their needs. Monitoring processes, and the oversight of these processes, had not been carried out appropriately to ensure patients were in receipt of effective correct care and treatment for their long-term conditions.
• The provision of cervical screening for eligible women did not meet national targets.
• The practice had a limited system to learn and make improvements when things went wrong.
• The way the practice was led and managed did not always promote the delivery of high-quality, person-centred care due to a lack of consistent oversight of systems and process.