Harmony Medical Diet Clinic in Bedford

Updated 21 June 2021

Harmony Medical Diet Clinic in Bedford is a private weight loss service provided by Harmony (Your Gentle Way To Slim) Limited. It is located in first floor premises in Bedford town centre. The service is provided on a walk-in basis. Patients are seen by a doctor and there is a charge for any medicines supplied. The service is available to adults aged 18 and over, and is open on Thursdays from 9.30am to 4.30pm. The provider also runs clinics in Coventry, Wood Green and Westminster which are registered with CQC. They have been inspected as part of our programme.

How we inspected this service

During the inspection we spoke to staff including the manager, 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 21 June 2021

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

We carried out an announced focused inspection at Harmony Medical Diet Clinic in Bedford to follow up on breaches of regulations.

The key questions at this inspection are rated as:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We did not inspect caring and responsive services because our monitoring did not indicate a change since the last inspection. The ratings from the last inspection have been carried forward.

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

CQC inspected the service on 5 March 2020 and asked the provider to make improvements regarding good governance. We checked these areas as part of this focused inspection and found they had been resolved.

Harmony Medical Diet Clinic provides weight loss services for adults, including the provision of medicines for the purposes of weight loss under the supervision of a doctor.

The doctor 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:

• Clear protocols were in place to support safe prescribing
• The doctors provided information and advice to support weight loss
• There had been improvements in monitoring risks and using information to make changes to the service
• Arrangements were in place to support social distancing and staff followed infection prevention procedures

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Improve arrangements for access to medical records in the event that they cease trading
• Only supply unlicensed medicines against valid special clinical needs of an individual patient where there is no suitable licensed medicine available

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