Archived: Vir Health Limited

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We rated this service as Good overall.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We carried out an announced comprehensive at Vir Health Limited on 15 & 17 March 2021 as part of our inspection programme and to provide a quality rating.

Vir Health Limited is a digital health service providing online consultations on a specified range of health conditions. It is a service aimed at adults; all patients must be over 18 years of age. It operates through the following website: www.numan.com

At this inspection we found:

• The service had good systems to manage risk so that safety incidents were less likely to happen. When they did happen, the service learned from them and improved their processes.
• The service routinely reviewed the effectiveness and appropriateness of the care it provided. It ensured that care and treatment was delivered according to evidence-based guidelines.
• Staff involved and treated people with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.
• Patients could access care and treatment from the service within an appropriate timescale for their needs.
• There was a strong focus on continuous learning and improvement at all levels of the organisation.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Improve the information available to patients before they request unlicensed medicines and ensure they acknowledge that they have seen and understood the information
• Improve the website to ensure that medicines without a product licence are described as unlicensed medicines, not as ‘off-label’ medicines which are licensed medicines used outside the terms of their product licence.
• Improve the information collected from patients with asthma to ensure that they limit the number of treatments prescribed prior to an annual review from a clinician trained in asthma management.
• Improve the sign-up process for the service to ensure patients are clear about the associated costs of prescriptions and that they are only prescribing the number of prescriptions they require.
• Improve the process of recording changes which patients have made in their responses to the questionnaires, so that clinicians can take that into account when deciding whether to prescribe.
• Improve the complaints process to include signposting to an arbitration complaints process.

Dr Rosie Benneyworth BM BS BMedSci MRCGP

Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services and Integrated Care