Archived: Dr Glancey Clinics

Updated 18 October 2022

• The name of the provider is Dr. Glancey Clinics Limited. The registered address of the provider is 3-7 Dickens House, Guithavon Street, Witham, CM8 1BJ.
• The provider has one registered location, based in Essex at The Constable Country Medical Centre, Heath Road, East Bergholt, Essex, CO7 6RT. We visited this location as part of our inspection. The provider first registered with the CQC in 2019 and is registered to provide services to adults aged 18 years and over.
• Services offered include those that fall under registration, such as hair transplants, liposuction, labiaplasty, surgical face and neck lifts, thread lift, hay fever injections (Kenalog), skinny jab and joint injections. Other procedures that do not fall under the scope of registration include for example, Botox injections, warts and other skin lesions.
• The clinic is located at The Constable County Medical Centre, a purpose-built GP practice on the outskirts of East Bergholt.
• The provider's website is https://www.drglancey-clinics.com
• The service is open on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9am until 5pm.

How we inspected this service

Before the inspection, we asked the provider to send us some information, which was reviewed prior to the inspection day. We also reviewed information held by CQC on our internal systems. During the inspection we spoke with the Medical Director, one healthcare assistant, one dental nurse and one new employee who was unqualified, but who we were told would be trained to become a healthcare assistant. We made observations of the facilities and service provision and reviewed documents, records and information held by the service.

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 18 October 2022

This service is rated as Inadequate overall.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Inadequate

Are services effective? – Inadequate

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Inadequate

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection on 12 September 2022. This was to follow up on breaches of regulations and enforcement identified at our previous inspection on 11 January 2022.

At the previous inspection in January 2022, we rated the service as inadequate overall. This was because we rated the provider as inadequate for providing safe and well-led services, requires improvement for providing effective services and good for providing caring and responsive services. We found breaches of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 and the service was served with a warning notice for Regulation 12, Safe Care and Treatment and a requirement notice for Regulation 17, Good governance.

At this inspection in September 2022, we found that the provider had not complied with all of the elements in the warning notice and we identified further concerns.

Dr. Glancey Clinics is registered under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to provide the following regulated activities:

• Treatment of disease, disorder or injury
• Surgical procedures
• Diagnostic and screening procedures.

This service provides independent surgical and non-surgical aesthetic services, offering a mix of regulated treatments as well as other non-regulated aesthetic treatments. There are some exemptions from regulation by CQC which relate to particular types of regulated activities and services and these are set out in Schedule 1 and Schedule 2 of The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. We only inspected and reported on the services which are within the scope of registration with the CQC.

The Medical Director 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.

We saw from reviews on the service website and on Google, that patients were consistently positive about the service, describing staff as professional, helpful and caring. We did not speak with patients as part of this inspection.

Our key findings were:

• The service did not have adequate safety systems and processes in place to keep people safe for example safe prescribing, medicines management and infection prevention and control.
• The processes for documenting care and treatment patients received were not always completed adequately to keep patients safe.
• Staff treated patients with compassion, respect and kindness and involved them in decisions about their care.
• The leadership and governance arrangements at the service were not effective. There was little understanding of the management of risks, a lack of assurance and failures in the systems and processes to ensure safe, effective and well led services.

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

• Care and treatment must be provided in a safe way for service users.
• Establish effective systems and processes to ensure good governance in accordance with the fundamental standards of care.

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

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Continue to embed the process for verifying the age of patients.

This service was placed in special measures in January 2022. Insufficient improvements have been made such that there remains an overall rating of inadequate and for safe, effective and well-led services. Due to further serious concerns identified, we took urgent action to suspend the provider from providing regulated activities from this location for the period of one month. The service will be kept under review and if needed could be escalated to further enforcement action. Where necessary, another inspection will be conducted, and if there is not enough improvement, we will move to close the service by adopting our proposal to vary the provider’s registration to remove this location or cancel the provider’s registration.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Hospitals and Interim Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services.