Albany Medical Centre

Updated 29 August 2023

Albany Medical Centre is a private slimming clinic for adults only, located in Sidcup, South East London. The clinic consists of a reception and two consulting rooms which are located on the ground floor. The clinic was staffed by a clinic manager, two male doctors, and two female clinic assistants who also acted as receptionists. The clinic provides slimming advice and prescribes medicines to support weight reduction. It was open for booked appointments on Tuesdays and Fridays 10:30am to 7pm and Saturdays 10:30am to 1pm. Patients could walk in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays to book clinic appointments. Patients could also be weighed and have their blood pressure readings taken. However, they could not be supplied medicines at these times as the doctors were not available. The provider operates 3 other slimming clinics; 1 in Inner London and 2 in Wales. All 4 clinics are registered by the relevant regulators.

How we inspected this service

Prior to the inspection we reviewed information about this service and other services operated by this provider, including the previous inspection report and information from the provider. During the inspection we spoke to the registered manager, clinic 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?

Updated 29 August 2023

This service is rated as Good overall. (Previous inspection October 2022 – Requires improvement)

As a focused inspection, the key questions we inspected and rated are:

Are services safe? – Good

Are services effective? – Good

Are services well-led? – Good

We did not inspect the key questions of caring and responsive because our monitoring did not indicate a change of either rating since the last inspection. The ratings from the last inspection have been carried forward:

Are services caring? – Good

Are services responsive? – Good

We carried out an unannounced focused inspection at Albany Medical Centre on 25 July 2023, to follow up on breaches of regulations.

CQC inspected the service on 14 October 2022 and asked the provider to make improvements regarding:

• The care and treatment of patients.
• The governance systems and processes.

We checked these areas as part of this focused inspection and found they had been resolved.

This service is registered with CQC under the Health and Social Care Act 2008 in respect of some, but not all, of the services it provides. 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. At the previous inspection Albany Medical Centre provided a range of non-surgical cosmetic interventions, for example cosmetic injections and laser hair removal which are not within CQC scope of registration. Since the previous inspection the service has ceased to offer these services. Therefore, we did not inspect, or report on these services.

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 service kept records of potential patients who were deemed unsuitable for treatment. These records were reviewed to ensure that the screening process was effective.
• The clinic was clean and tidy.
• Processes to ensure the safe and effective delivery of care were effective.
• Clinical review included the monitoring of the effectiveness of treatments offered.
• Learning from clinical review at individual locations was shared across the service.

The areas where the provider should make improvements are:

• Only supply unlicensed medicines against valid special clinical needs of an individual patient where there is no suitable licensed medicine available.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Health Care