North London Slimming Clinic

Updated 16 June 2021

North London Slimming Clinic is an independent slimming clinic located in a residential property in Enfield, London. There is a ground floor reception, waiting room and consulting room. It is accessible by public transport, and there is parking available on the street close to the clinic.

The weight loss services, including the prescribing of medicines for the purposes of weight loss, are provided under the supervision of a doctor. The service is available to adults aged 18 and over. The clinic is open on Saturdays from 9am to 1pm.

How we inspected this service

During the inspection we spoke to managers, clinical and reception 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 16 June 2021

This service is rated as Good overall. (Previous inspection October 2020 – Requires improvement)

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 inspection at North London Slimming Clinic as part of our inspection programme to follow up on breaches of regulations.

CQC inspected the service on 24 October 2020 and rated it as requires improvement. The service remained in special measures. We asked the provider to make improvements regarding employment processes and good governance. We checked these areas as part of this comprehensive inspection and found they had been resolved.

North London Slimming Clinic is located in Enfield, London. It provides weight loss services including the prescribing of medicines for the purposes of weight reduction.

The clinic 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.

Our key findings were:

• The doctor provided person-centred consultations and a range of advice and guidance to support weight loss.
• There had been an improvement in governance arrangements. Systems were in place to monitor the quality and safety of services and risks to patients and staff.
• Recruitment procedures had been followed for all staff.
• The premises were arranged to support social distancing, and infection prevention measures were followed.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Improve the process for ensuring that the electronic patient records are kept up to date in line with paper records
• Improve arrangements for maintaining records in the event that they cease trading
• Develop arrangements for obtaining patient feedback
• Improve confidentiality of consultations when the waiting area is quiet
• Only supply unlicensed medicines against valid special clinical needs of an individual patient where there is no suitable licensed medicine available

I am taking this service out of special measures. This recognises the significant improvements that have been made to the quality of care provided by this service.

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