GP surgery bosses insist they are working to improve after 'inadequate' ratings
A damning Care Quality Commission report put Graham Road Surgery and Horizon Health Centre into special measures last month
Bosses of two GP surgeries in Weston-super-Mare rated “inadequate” have insisted they are working to improve them.
A damning Care Quality Commission report put Graham Road Surgery and Horizon Health Centre into special measures last month. The two GP surgeries received the CQCs lowest rating — inadequate — overall, and in the specific areas of being safe and well-led. Other areas were rated “requires improvement.”
Now, up before North Somerset Council’s health overview and scrutiny panel (HOSP), bosses of Pier Health Group which runs the services have said they are working to turn them around. Director of the group, Dr John Heather insisted: “We know how to run general practice, and we know how to run general practice safely.”
Pier Health Group put issues down to a lack of capacity and culture issues and said they were working to address these issues and turn the practice around. Chief Executive Brandie Deignan, who said her career was about fixing broken things, said: “We are going through the transformation of culture now. I don’t know when we’ll get the culture right but we are getting there.”
Dr Heather said that they had brought in new doctors and fixed a coding problem which had affected 30,000 documents over the last 18 months. bringing in new doctors and addressing issues, such as a coding problem which affected 30,000 documents for 18 months.
But Ian Parker, councillor for the Weston-super-Mare South ward which contains Horizon, said: “It’s only been achieved because the CQC have been breathing down your necks.”
He said that in 2015, the Locality Health Centre had been the only GP in North Somerset to achieve an “outstanding” CQC rating, going down just slightly to “good” in 2017. He said: “In November 2018, Pier Health took over the running of the Health Centre, renamed it Horizon and then things started to go downhill.”
Dr Heather insisted that they had been working on improving the GP surgeries before the CQC inspection, although he said: “It focusses you.” He said: “We want to do this because it is the right thing to do.”
One member of the public, Andrew Rogers, addressed the panel at the start of the meeting as a public speaker and called for Pier Health to lose the contract. He said that there had been repeated reports about issues at Graham Road Surgery and warned the building was “a total slum.”
The CQC will reinspect the two GP practices within six months of the publication of their report on September 1.