Archived: The Slimming Clinic

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Slimming Clinic, Gillingham on 5 November 2019 to rate the service.

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

The service 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.

16 people provided feedback about the service via comment cards. All the feedback was positive. Comments covered the staff being professional, helpful, supportive and caring, within a clean, comfortable and tidy environment.

Our key findings were:

• Patients were positive about the staff and the service provided by the clinic.
• Learning from other services within parent company was shared and implemented.
• The clinic was in a good state of repair, clean and tidy.
• Consent to or not to contact the patients’ GP was not consistently recorded within patient records.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Review patent records to ensure they are complete and in line with the service’s policy, including the rationale for prescribing outside of the services prescribing guidelines.
• 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.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP
Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care