Archived: The Slimming Clinic

Updated 9 April 2020

The Slimming Clinic is an independent provider of weight management services, including prescribed medicines, dietary and lifestyle advice. The clinic is located in Crawley town centre on the second floor of a shared building. There is toilet access within the clinic. The clinic currently does not offer step-free access for patients. The clinic is open Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Prior to the inspection we reviewed information about this service and other services operated by this provider, including the previous inspection report and information from the provider. We spoke to the registered manager, clinical staff and reviewed a range of documents.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we always ask the following five questions:

•Is it safe?

•Is it effective?

•Is it caring?

•Is it responsive to people’s needs?

•Is it well-led?

These questions therefore formed the framework for the areas we looked at during the inspection.

Updated 9 April 2020

This service is rated as Good overall. (Previous inspection February 2018 – not rated)

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

The Slimming Clinic, Crawley provides weight loss services, including prescribed medicines and dietary advice to support weight reduction.

The clinic manager is the registered manager. A registered manager is a person who is registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run.

11 people provided feedback about the service via comment cards. The majority of the feedback was positive (10 people). Comments about the staff included being friendly, caring and happy to give advice. Comments about the service included providing an environment that was warm, welcoming and clean. However, one person was unhappy with the changes to the fees.

Our key findings were:

•Patients were positive about the staff and the service provided.

•Prescribing and record keeping were in line with the provider’s policies.

•Learning from across the services operated by the providers was shared and implemented.

•The clinic was in a good state of repair, clean and tidy.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

•To continually encourage the patient to consent to information sharing between the service and their GP

•Only supply unlicensed medicines against valid special clinical needs of an individual patient where there is no suitable licensed medicine available

•To ensure that the independent adjudication service is appropriate for the service

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care