Burnham-On-Sea’s MP has visited the team running the town’s Medical Centre this week amid ongoing work to improve its services.
MP James Heappey heard about the various activities underway to make the service better for patients and he praised the team for the progress during his visit on Friday (May 12th).
It comes after the medical centre in Burnham’s Love Lane was placed in special measures last summer following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) when “significant concerns” were identified relating to patient safety, leadership and governance.
Since last year’s inspection, Symphony Healthcare Services has been helping to run the centre, which was near to closing down and it formally integrated with Symphony in April. Symphony currently operates 21 practices covering 22% of Somerset’s population.
A new online platform called ‘Ask My GP’ was recently launched at the centre to make it easier to access medical services for patients.
A director at Symphony Healthcare Services, Dr Harvey Sampson, said that a new survey has found 73% feel access to medical services has got better since the new service was launched.
He says “siginificant headway” has been made to improve the service, adding that recruitment for extra staff is also underway.
MP James Heappey told Burnham-On-Sea.com: “The job is not yet done – no-one here is pretending that it is – but to consider that this practice was very close to being closed down if it weren’t for the incredible work that Symphony did and a handful of indivuduals this practice would not have continued to operate. That would have been catastrophic for the town because there are no alternatives.”
“Instead, a year on, we are now in a place where the practice is recovering quickly and a lot of the faults that were identified last summer are also resolved. Patient confidence is returning. There is still work to be done – there are problems with primary healthcare nationwide that Burnham won’t be exempt from, but in terms of this practice, it’s an extraordinary journey and a lot of people should be proud of what they have done.”
