25% of GP’s surgeries are unsafe

AT least 800,000 patients are registered with unsafe GPs, the Care Quality Commission warns.

Doctors are not receiving annual CPR training and patients are not being called in for routine cancer screening.

Inspectors have visited 4,500 practices in England – just over half the total, of which 180 were rated inadequate for safety.

But the independent regulator of health and social care services expects 300 surgeries covering 1.6million patients will be rated inadequate once inspections are complete.

Four per cent of practices were rated outstanding, 83 per cent were good, 10 per cent required improvement, while 3 per cent were inadequate.

But the gradings are far worse for safety, with 22 per cent requiring improvement and 4 per cent inadequate.

Its report stressed that although most of the population were receiving good GP care, a significant proportion of practices were failing, including the Friary Surgery in Richmond, North Yorkshire, whose four GPs had not had their annual CPR training. Doctors are meant to be trained every year to ensure their skills are up to date.

At the Greenbank Medical Practice in Oldham, Greater Manchester, more than a fifth of women are not being asked in for cervical cancer checks, which are meant to be offered to all female patients aged 25 to 49. Patients are forced to queue from 8am for an appointment at the Loxford Polyclinic in Illford, Essex, because it is impossible for them to get through on the telephone.

Other failings include practices keeping out- of- date medicines and failing to carry out recruitment checks on staff.

The watchdog also warned that the number of GPs was falling while registered patients were up, driven by migration.

In 2015, there were just over 34,000 full-time family doctors, down from 37,000 in 2014.

Dr Richard Vautrey, of the British Medical Association’s GP committee, said: ‘Given the incredible pressure on general practice it is a remarkable level of achievement that close to nine in ten practices are rated good or outstanding.’