Great Barr Medical Centre

Updated 4 April 2024

Great Barr Medical Centre is a GP practice and provides a range of primary medical services. The GP practice is registered with the Care Quality Commission under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to provide the following regulated activities, diagnostic and screening procedures, family planning, midwifery and maternity services, surgical procedures and treatment of disease, disorder or injury. We inspected and rated this service under our previous methodology on 26 and 27 April 2023. The practice was rated inadequate overall, and for key questions safe, effective, responsive and well-led, caring was rated as requires improvement. Following this inspection the practice was placed into special measures and due to the significant concerns identified, the GP providers were suspended for a period of 9 months. During this period of suspension, caretaking arrangements were in place to provide patients with GP services. The GP providers returned to practice in February 2024. Due to a number of whistle blowing concerns that have been raised since their return, we carried out an unannounced assessment of 67 quality statements, under the safe, effective, responsive and well-led key questions on 7 May 2024. The assessment was carried out remotely and included an on-site inspection. The service has been rated as inadequate overall, and inadequate for the effective and well led key questions and requires improvement for safe and responsive key questions, we did not assess caring at this assessment. The practice remains in special measures as a result of concerns we found and we did not have assurances that improvements by the caretaking team were being sustained to ensure continuity of care. You can find more details in the evidence category findings.

Updated 4 April 2024

We recognise the pressure that practices are currently working under, and the efforts staff are making to maintain levels of access for their patients. At the same time, our strategy makes a commitment to deliver regulation driven by people’s needs and experiences of care. At our previous inspection we found that patients could not always access appointments in a timely way and patient satisfaction reflected this in the National GP patient survey. At this assessment we continued to see access to appointments was a concern with limited availability to see a GP on the day we visited. A duty doctor was now in place, however due to the actions of the provider in reducing the clinical team, this had impacted on the number of appointments available. Feedback from staff highlighted the ongoing difficulties faced by patients in seeing a GP. Results from the National GP Patient Survey showed the practice were significantly below local and national averages in the overall experience of making an appointment, with 10% of patients responding positively to making an appointment in comparison to the local average of 44% and the national average of 54%. The National GP People told us the practice had achieved lower than local and national averages in patients being involved in decisions about their care and treatment.