Great Barr Medical Centre

Updated 24 October 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.

The GP partners returned in February 2024 following a period of suspension and due to whistle blowing concerns raised an unannounced assessment was carried out in May 2024, where we found concerns in a range of key questions and the practice was rated inadequate overall, and for key questions effective and well-led, safe, caring and responsive were rated as requires improvement.

We carried out an announced assessment of 34 quality statements, under the safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led key questions on 8 November 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 safe and effective and requires improvement for caring, responsive and well led key questions. The practice remains in special measures as a result of concerns we found and we did not have assurances that improvements by the GP partners were being sustained to ensure continuity of care. You can find more details in the evidence category findings.

Updated 24 October 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 assessment we found that patients could not always access appointments in a timely way and at this assessment we found this continued to be a concern with a significant negative variation in the outcomes of the National GP patient survey for patient access and feedback received from patients during the on site assessment also highlighted the difficulties patients experienced in accessing the service. A duty doctor was in place and the providers had increased the number of clinical staff available, however there continued to be ongoing difficulties in seeing a GP. Results from the National GP Patient Survey showed some improvement in the survey results in comparison to 2023, but continued to be significantly below local and national averages in the overall experience of making an appointment, with 18% of patients responding positively to getting through to the practice by phone in comparison to the local average of 44% and the national average of 50%. The National Patient survey showed that patients had confidence and trust in the healthcare professional they saw with the practice having achieved 92%, this was in line with local and national averages. Information provided by the practice showed an inhouse survey had been completed in November 2024 and by the end of the month a total of 415 patients had submitted their comments. This showed an improvement in access with the practice having scored 45.7% for getting through to someone at the practice. However, feedback from patients continued to show negative experiences in accessing services. The practice had an action plan in place to continue to improve access which included ongoing monitoring of appointments.