Archived: The Slimming Clinic

Updated 31 October 2019

The Slimming Clinic provides weight loss treatment and services, including prescribed medicines and dietary advice, to support weight reduction. The service is located on the first floor of a shared building in a city centre location. The premises consist of a reception and waiting room and one consulting room. The service is open for half a day on Tuesday, alternate Saturdays and all-day Thursday.

How we inspected this service

Prior to the inspection we reviewed information about the service, 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 31 October 2019

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Slimming Clinic, Portsmouth on 1 October 2019 to rate the service.

The Slimming Clinic, Portsmouth 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.

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

Our key findings were:

• Patients were positive about their experience at the service.
• The clinic was in a good state of repair, clean and tidy.
• Reviews were in place to monitor the quality of care. However, the conclusions of one review were not fed into the subsequent review cycle.
• The systems for monitoring medicines fridge temperatures did not provide assurance that medicine stored in the fridge were safe to use.

The area where the provider must make improvements as they are in breach of regulations is:

• Ensure care and treatment is provided in a safe way to patients.

(Please see the specific details on action required at the end of this report).

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 the feedback they request from patients to include more information about the consultation and treatment.

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