900 GP practices face CQC inspection

Almost 900 practices were found to be at risk of breaching care standards, nearly a quarter of these being in London.

Commonly cited issues within practices included insufficient access to doctors and difficulties in arranging breast cancer checks. Inspectors are to visit potentially failing practices over the winter period, while lowerrisk surgeries are to be address over the next two years. The CQC has based practices’ risk ratings on 38 indicators taken from sources such as patient feedback forms and government statistics. Indicators include: the number of respondents to the GP patient survey who rated their care as fairly good or very good; flu vaccination percentage rates; dementia diagnosis rates; and the number of emergency admissions that could be addressed outside hospitals.

Pulse magazine reports that GPs have been critical of the CQC’s risk assessments, with some accusing them of drawing on “simplistic” indicators and using data as “sticks to beat GPs with.” The CQC comments that these measures should not be seen as a judgement of care quality: “We will use our analysis of these indicators to raise questions, not make judgements, about the quality of care. Our judgements will always follow inspections, which take into account the results of our intelligent monitoring and reports from other organisations.”

Dr Richad Vautry, deputy chair of the General Practitioners Committee, said: “The art of general practice isn’t reflected within these very simplistic and bald statements, but also to provide this level of detail and information without any context on the practice from which it came from. There’s no link about what type of patients a particular practice provides services too. What funding levels they receive compared to other practices, the challenges practices face from premises, or support from community team.

“They’re becoming more and more sticks to beat general practices with, and more and more targets – when we’ve seen the dangers of a target culture in mid-Staffs, and the consequences of organisations simply focusing on performance management targets, and there’s a risk of this happening to practices as well.”

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