Private Medical Clinic

On this page

• Overview
• Assessing needs
• Delivering evidence-based care and treatment
• How staff, teams and services work together
• Supporting people to live healthier lives
• Monitoring and improving outcomes
• Consent to care and treatment

We looked for evidence that staff involved people in decisions about their care and treatment and provided them advice and support. Staff regularly reviewed people’s care and worked with other services to achieve this.
This is the first inspection for this service since its registration with CQC. This key question has been rated as good.
 

This service scored 63 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

The service made sure people’s care and treatment was effective by assessing and reviewing their health, care, wellbeing and communication needs with them. Feedback from people using the service was positive. Records we reviewed showed that clinical assessments were mostly thorough and staff used digital templates to maintain the quality of record keeping. Home visits were available for patients on request.

The provider planned and delivered people’s care and treatment with them, including what was important to them. Systems were in place to ensure staff were up-to-date with evidence-based guidance and legislation.
However, the provider had prescribed weight loss medications to 244 patients and our review of a sample of patient records showed that they did not always follow national evidence-based guidelines. Our review of the records of patients who had been prescribed travel vaccines showed that not all of the recommended information about the patient’s travel had been requested or recorded to ensure that the patient was offered all relevant vaccinations (Good Practice Guidance for Providing a Travel Health Service (Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow)). The provider did not always store medicines in accordance with national medicines management guidance.
 

The service worked well across teams, locations and services to support people. Staff had access to the information they needed to appropriately assess, plan, and deliver people’s care, treatment, and support. The practice shared information with other services in an effective and timely way. The service had agreed referral pathways with some other private providers for example, for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) assessments. Where these did not exist for example if a person needed clinical imaging, feedback had shown that people preferred to be given a referral and supported to choose the most suitable provider for their needs.

The service supported people to manage their health and wellbeing to maximise their independence, choice and control. The service supported people to live healthier lives and where possible, health promotion advice was incorporated into every consultation.

The service had a responsive program of clinical and medicines audits to monitor quality and outcomes. Audits resulted in effective actions and improvements for people using the service. However, a proportion of audits were completed in response to a significant event. Whilst this demonstrates a commitment to thorough investigation of such events; it also highlights that internal quality monitoring systems may not be effective in identifying shortcomings before an event occurs. For example, as a result of a complaint it was found that a person with a history of certain musculoskeletal conditions was prescribed a medicine which was contraindicated. This event triggered an audit, which found that contraindication screening for this medicine was not being completed in 90% of cases. This led to a positive overall outcome whereby actions were implemented to improve practice.
From the clinical notes we reviewed, we found that people who used the service mostly experienced positive outcomes as set out in legislation, standards, and evidence-based clinical guidance. We found some inconsistency with national guidelines regarding the provision of travel vaccines and weight loss medicines.
 

Staff understood and reported that they applied the legislation relating to consent. However, an internal audit carried out between May 2025 and April 2026 showed that consent was not documented in the majority of cases. The provider believed this to be a reflection of a documentation system gap rather than a reflection of clinical practice. They had taken action to make this a mandatory field on the digital assessment template to improve the documentation of consent.