A GP practice has been rated ‘outstanding’ overall by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), after it was inspected in December 2017.
Haughton Thornley Medical Centres in Denton and Hyde, Greater Manchester has been rated good for being ‘safe’, ‘effective’ and ‘caring’ and outstanding for being responsive and well-led.
The inspectors praised the practice’s Patient Participation Group (PPG), which they found was encouraging patients to get sign up for online access to their medical reports.
The report said: ‘We saw to date the practice have 62% of patients signed up for access. The practice was in the process of evaluating the impact and monitoring usage to assess the benefits to patients and the practice.’
Back in 2009, Management in Practice reported that the practice had won the Information Management and Technology Award, sponsored by iQ Medical, for setting up a new patient web portal and integrated intranet that has informed and empowered its patients.
The PPG also ran an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) course in partnership with Hyde Community Action. Around 16 female patients benefited from it and all of them ‘reported increased confidence, knowledge, awareness of online access to health records, healthy eating, exercise, pharmacy and other local services and they shared the information with their family and friends’.
Haughton Thornley Medical Centres provide GP services under a GMS contract to 12043 patients across its two sites.
CQC Head of General Practice in the North Beverley Cole said: ‘All of the staff at this practice should be very proud of the service they are providing. Other providers should look to them as an example of how to provide great high quality care.
‘The practice had integrated social prescribing pathways and templates into the clinical system allowing staff to quickly refer patients for additional support in the community where required, for example to Age UK and the community response team.’
Practice manager Wendy Povey said: ‘We are a very forward thinking practice and have a team of clinicians, administrators and patients who all have a shared vision for the practice. Our CQC rating demonstrated that we still endeavour to deliver quality services which are above and beyond the core GMS contract, despite the financial constraints within the NHS.’
