15 & 17 March 2021
During a routine inspection
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