Archived: The Bodyline Clinic Limited Birkenhead

Updated 19 February 2020

Bodyline Birkenhead is a private clinic which provides medical treatment for weight loss.

• The clinic comprises of a reception area and three consulting rooms situated on the ground floor.
• The clinic is open on Mondays from 4pm until 8pm, Tuesdays from 4pm to 7pm and Wednesdays 11am until 3pm. The clinic provides an appointment for first time patients and a walk-in service for repeat visits.
• The clinic employs a clinic manager and four nurses.

How we inspected this service

We spoke to the registered manager, nurses and receptionist and reviewed a range of documents. We spoke to three patients and received 20 comment cards. 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 19 February 2020

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Bodyline Clinic Limited Birkenhead to follow up on a breach of regulations and to rate the service.

CQC inspected the service on 21 November 2018 and asked the provider to make improvements regarding safe provision of treatment, to protect patients from the risks of supplying more than one medicine with the same action. We checked these areas as part of this comprehensive inspection and found this had been resolved.

Bodyline Birkenhead is a private clinic which provides medical treatment for weight loss for adults over the age of 18.

One of the nurses 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.

20 people provided feedback about the service. All the feedback was positive. Patients told us that staff were professional, helpful and listened. The environment was always clean and organised.

Our key findings were :

• Patients felt supported and staff were helpful.
• The provider had good governance in place, audit outcomes and lessons learnt were shared at the monthly clinical meeting.
• The provider was developing its ongoing support for patients using online solutions.
• The provider supplied medicines that required refrigeration, but we were not assured of the monitoring. This is because the minimum and maximum temperatures had not been recorded.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Only supply unlicensed medicines against valid special clinical needs of an individual patient where there is no suitable licensed medicine available.
• Review and update policies for medicines that require refrigeration so that appropriate temperature monitoring is carried out.