A ROYAL Wootton Bassett surgery has been warned by the health watchdog it must improve following an inspection in March.

But patients have praised the way they are treated there.

Tinkers Lane Surgery was adjudged to require improvement across the board by the Care Quality Commission.

In an inspection on March 23 the surgery was assessed for its safety, effectiveness, care, responsiveness and leadership.

Prof Steve Field, CQC chief inspector of general practice, said the surgery must look to improve across the board.

He said: “Urgent appointments were usually available on the day they were requested. However, patients said there were waits of up to two weeks for non-urgent appointments, there was difficulty getting through to the practice when phoning to make an appointment and waits of up to 40 minutes after appointment times.

“Few clinical audits had been carried out. There was limited evidence to demonstrate that audits were driving performance to improve patient outcomes.

“Data showed patient outcomes for March 2015 demonstrated an improvement from 2013/14 which had been overall below average for the local clinical commissioning group."

The report said staff understand and fulfil their responsibilities to raise concerns, and to report incidents and near misses and information about safety is recorded, monitored, appropriately reviewed and addressed.

The report also said risks to patients are assessed and well managed, with the exception of those relating to some recruitment checks.

It added: “Patients said they were treated with compassion, dignity and respect and they were involved in their care and decisions about their treatment."

Information about services and how to complain was available and easy to understand.

The report said: “The surgery has worked with Carers Support Wiltshire in recent years, obtaining their Gold Award, followed by Gold Plus and this year was working to achieving the new Gold award.

“The practice held two to three carers’ clinics a year and carers' events twice a year.

“A number of staff were dementia friends and there were plans for more staff to undertake the training.”

The practice has an expanding patient population of 8,758 of which the highest proportion are of working age.

The practice has had a number of key staff changes during the last two years which staff described as having an impact on the morale of staff and the smooth running of the practice.

The surgery was told it must maintain accurate staff training records and patient care and treatment records.

Instructions were also given for an improvement in patient access to appointments and to keep policies and procedure for staff updated.

The monitoring of patients’ medicine must also be kept up to an effective level, whilst Tinkers Lane must ensure safeguarding measures are in place for at-risk patients.

The practice failed to respond to the Adver’s request for comment.