Shropshire GPs wait for news after apology over flaws in patient safety report
Eleven GP surgeries in Shropshire are waiting to hear if they were rated incorrectly over patient safety risks by a health watchdog.
It comes after the The Care Quality Commission (CQC) was forced to apologise to hundreds of GPs for giving them incorrect patient safety risk ratings.
More than 7,000 GP practices in England were put into one of six risk bandings, which could trigger early inspections.
The CQC has introduced a new banding system to prioritise which surgeries should be inspected first using a plethora of information including patient experiences and surveys.
Eight out of the county's 66 practices – four in Telford, three in Shrewsbury and one in Ludlow – were placed in the lowest "Band 1" rating, labelled "highest perceived concern" by CQC chiefs.
A further three, two in Telford and one in Shrewsbury, were placed in "Band 2".
But an investigation has found serious errors in the calculations used by the CQC to come up with the ratings.
Around 60 practices have been taken out of the high-risk category and four which had been placed in the low-risk catagory now need early inspection, according to new information which has just been released.
It has not yet been revealed whether the bandings have been changed for any of the Shropshire and Telford GP surgeries identified in the original report.
Sir Mike Richards, chief inspector for the CQC, said: "We will make them a big apology.
"This only became apparent when we ran the data on the thousands of practices rather than just the hundreds that we tested them on."
He defended the publication of the risk bands in the interest of transparency.
He said: "We are using the data to help us know where we might go first.
"Our judgement comes from a combination of data and inspection. The main thing that is going to matter is that we are going to be inspecting every practice."
The British Medical Association said mistakes by the CQC risked "doing serious harm" to the reputation of good surgeries.
Its GP committee chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, said: "We warned at the time that simplistic targets would fail to take into account the enormous pressures GP practices are facing, and that skewed and limited information does not tell us about the quality of care.
"These failings have the potential to seriously undermine the trust in the system and patients' confidence in their GP and it is only right that all of those practices affected are now contacted and receive a full apology."
