A YORK GP practice has been put in special measures after a health watchdog concluded it was ‘inadequate'.

Unity Health, which runs Kimberlow Hill surgery in Heslington and Wenlock Terrace off Fulford Road, emailed patients to say the Care Quality Commission (CQC) had found it failed to meet national standards in a number of areas during an inspection.

These included arrangements for monitoring and reviewing prescribing, weaknesses in the management of potential risks to patient safety, complaints handling and systems to monitor staff competency.

But the practice has now compounded its problems by accidentally giving each patient the email addresses of 1,200 other patients, in breach of data protection rules.

The CQC’s inspection was conducted in May, at about the time The Press was exposing severe problems for patients in phoning to make appointments, which left some having to get taxis to the surgery to make an appointment in person.

The practice said it would be closely monitored by the CQC over coming weeks to ensure it acted quickly to address its shortcomings.

It said: “Naturally, this news comes as a huge disappointment to all of the staff working at Unity Health. We also appreciate that it has the potential to cause you to be concerned and we apologise most sincerely for that.

“We wanted to take this opportunity to reassure you and let you know that we are doing everything in our power to put things right quickly and to get a speedy reinspection that will take us out of special measures.”

It said the practice had already put a number of key improvements in place, including changing its telephone system and taking on new call handling staff, suspending its online triage service until further notice, pausing the registration of new patients, overhauling the complaints system to ensure all concerns are responded to in a timely manner, and bringing in support from the Royal College of General Practitioners.

The CQC report branded Unity Health ‘inadequate’ in response to four questions: are services safe, effective, responsive and well-led? It said it required improvement in response to the question, are services caring?

The report said the practice "did not have a good track record on safety", and systems for managing and storing medicines did not always minimise risks.

It said patient feedback was ‘very poor’ over access to appointments, with patients unable to get through due to telephone issues, there were clinical and reception staff shortages, and not all staff had the skills, knowledge and experience to carry out their roles, for example during triaging by nurses.

Unity Health partner Dr Richard Wilcox said yesterday: “The priority now is to roll up our sleeves, continue making the improvements that have been identified and focus on getting things right for our patients going forward.” He added that good progress had already been made.

* Unity Health has apologised after accidentally giving patients the email addresses of 1,200 other patients when it emailed them about the CQC’s report.

GP partner Dr Mark Astill told patients the practice was ‘very sorry’ a mistake had been made when sending the message, and said that it took "any breaches of data protection with the utmost seriousness".

He said steps had already been taken, with the Information Commissioner’s Office informed and the incident reported to the NHS through the ‘NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit'.

He added: “We will also be taking internal steps to discover why this error occurred, to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again....Please accept our sincere apology.”

Surgery managing partner Louise Johnston stressed yesterday that no medically confidential information had been passed on.