City Skin Doctor Clinic

This service is rated as Requires improvement overall.

The key questions are rated as:

Are services safe? – Requires improvement

Are services effective? – Requires improvement

Are services caring? – Requires improvement

Are services responsive? – Good

Are services well-led? – Requires improvement

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection of City Skin Doctor Clinic on 2 February 2023 as part of our inspection programme. This was the first inspection of this service.

City Skin Doctor Clinic is a medical aesthetic clinic providing surgical, non-surgical and laser treatments.

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. City Skin Doctors Clinic provides a range of non-surgical cosmetic interventions which are not within CQC scope of registration. Therefore, we did not inspect or report on these services.

Our key findings were:

• We found gaps in the mandatory training for staff members, including the appropriate level of safeguarding training. The system for oversight of staff training was not sufficient.
• We found that the practice had a governance framework, however, it was not always effectively managing risks. This included the risks associated with keeping comprehensive clinical records, recording patient safety alerts, ensuring appropriate emergency medicines and equipment were kept on site, keeping comprehensive and up to date staff recruitment files, ensuring the staff immunisation programme was in line with UK Health Security Agency guidance and providing independent interpreter services for patients.
• We did not see evidence of any clinical audits that had been undertaken which identified areas for improvement or evidence of other quality improvement activity.
• Staff involved and treated patients with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.
• The service actively sought and acted on feedback from patients to improve services.

The areas where the provider must make improvements as they are in breach of regulations are:

• Ensure care and treatment is provided in a safe way to patients.
• Establish effective systems and processes to ensure good governance in accordance with the fundamental standards of care.

In addition to the above, the practice should:

• Improve the process for patient identification and audit this process on a regular basis.
• Review and improve infection control processes, in particular in relation to the assembly of sharps bins.
• Review and improve the process and put in place a policy for the handling of pathology results.
• Improve the recording of staff meetings so that notes from meetings were available to staff members.

Dr Sean O’Kelly BSc MB ChB MSc DCH FRCA

Chief Inspector of Hospitals and Interim Chief Inspector of Primary Medical Services