A GP surgery which serves 12,000 patients has been deemed inadequate and must improve or may face closure.

Health watchdogs said the services provided at St Luke's Surgery, in Hedge End and its branch in Botley - known as Botley Health Care Centre - have deteriorated and are below the standard.

The practice has been rated inadequate for being safe, effective, responsive to people's needs and well-led and has been put into special measures for the next six months.

In an inspection carried out on February 12 and prompted by concerns raised, Care Quality Commission (CQC)'s watchdogs found that the leadership at the surgery had declined and there was no longer a registered manager, not all staff had a record of having completed safeguarding training, staff turnover had resulted in a number of management and clinical vacancies, which resulted in a gap in skills mix for the monitoring of long term conditions such as asthma.

In an official report, inspectors also said that few days before the inspection there was what they described as "a serious data protection breach".

The said patients personal email addresses were sent out as part of a group email to the surgery's patient reference group without insuring that email addresses were sent as blind copies.

The incident was already under investigation at the time of the inspection but although all patients had been notified, insoectors said staff members were unable to tell them about measures taken to prevent the issue happening again.

The inspection also found that patients found it difficult to use the appointment system and reported that they were not able to access care when they needed it but the surgery did not act on patients feedback.

However, the practice was rated good for caring, with patients saying staff treated them with kindness, compassion and respect.

Ruth Rankine, deputy chief inspector of general practice for the South of England, said:“While it is good to see that staff are still providing a caring service there needs to be an overall improvement within the practice for the sake of its patients. I am hopeful that the practice will do what is required for the sake of their patients but if we find that the service remains inadequate, we will consider taking further enforcement action even if that leads to cancelling its registration.”

Dr Sam Humphries, GP at St Luke’s, said: “The Partners were already addressing many of the concerns before the CQC inspection and we are committed to improving services for patients. We will continue to work closely with West Hampshire Clinical Commissioning Group, our professional advisers and our Patient Participation Group to put in place measures to address these issues.