Updated 21 February 2024
Abingdon Family Health Care Centre is a NHS GP practice which provides primary care services to patients in Liverpool. We carried out an announced assessment of one quality statement, equity of access, under the key question Responsive at Abingdon Family Health Care Centre on 6 March 2024. The practice is rated as good overall and continues to be rated as good for providing a responsive service. We carried out the assessment as part of our work to understand how practices are working to try to meet people’s demand for access and to better understand the experiences of people who use services and providers. 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. The assessment of the quality statement ‘Equity in access’ includes looking at what practices are doing innovatively to improve patient access to primary care and sharing this information to drive improvement. We found that the practice had organised services to be responsive to patients’ needs, including those who were most likely to have difficulty accessing care. However, the provider outlined challenges they have experienced with the phone system and the impact this has had for patients contacting the practice by phone and their experience of making an appointment. During the assessment process the provider highlighted the efforts they were making to improve the responsiveness of the service for their patient population, this included providing the majority of appointments on the day of request. However, there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that efforts made to date had improved patient experience in this area.