Archived: The Slimming Clinic

Updated 29 January 2020

The Slimming Clinic provides weight loss treatment and services, including prescribed medicines, dietary and lifestyle advice, to support weight reduction. The clinic is located on the ground and first floor of a unit in Bristol city centre. Staff include a clinic manager, two part-time doctors and a receptionist. The clinic is open on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

How we inspected this service

Prior to the inspection we reviewed information about this service and other services operated by this provider. This included the previous inspection report and information from the provider. We spoke to the clinic manager, a member of the clinical staff, a receptionist 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 29 January 2020

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at The Slimming Clinic, Bristol to rate the service for the provision of safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led services as part of our current inspection programme.

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

The clinic manager has applied to be the registered manager and is currently part way through the process. 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.

Five people provided feedback about the service via comment cards. The comments were all positive. Comments about the staff included being polite, helpful and encouraging. The comments about the clinic included providing a non-judgemental, encouraging service, and being delivered in a clean and tidy environment.

Our key findings were :

• Prescribing and record keeping were in line with the parent company’s policies.
• The clinic was in a good state of repair, clean and tidy.
• Learning from other services within the parent company was shared and implemented.

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.
• To continue to encourage patients to consent to share information between the service and their GP.
• To review the current policy around transfer of information from old style record cards to the new style record cards for existing patients.

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