Special measures remain in place at GP's surgery

A specialist team of inspectors rated the service provided by Dr Ankur Chopra as ‘inadequate’ for providing services that were safe and well-led, ‘requires improvement’ for responsive to people’s needs, and rated ‘good’ for being effective and caring.

After this second inspection, the overall rating for Dr Ankur Chopra’s practice at Roebuck House, High Street, stays as ‘inadequate’.

The practice was inspected in July 2016 by a team which included a CQC lead inspector, a GP specialist adviser, a CQC pharmacy inspector and a practice manager specialist adviser.

The inspection report, published earlier this month (February), said that while the CQC found staff caring, treating patients with compassion and dignity, inspectors identified a number of areas for improvement.

The report says that not all nursing staff were trained to the appropriate level of child safeguarding, there were ongoing maintenance issues at the surgery, complaints were not adequately addressed and there were still gaps in staff recruitment records.

Although improvements had been made in relation to medicines management, the report noted there continued to be some issues.

Ruth Rankine, deputy chief inspector of general practice (south) said: “It is clear that Dr Ankur Chopra has not made enough improvements since our previous inspection, in March 2016, where we again identified serious concerns relating to the safe delivery of services and leadership of the practice.

“We are aware it takes hard work and commitment from all practice staff to deliver the improved services which will result in higher standards of care for patients.

“We rated caring in the service as being good because there are examples of staff interacting with patients and treating them with dignity and respect.

“But, there is still a tremendous amount work to do and this needs to move at a pace.

“If we still feel the service is inadequate at our next inspection, then we will not hesitate to use our enforcement powers to protect patients using the service, even if this means removing the registration of the practice.”

The practice had been contacted by the Observer for a comment.

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