Essex Ultrasound and Medical Services is operated by Essex Ultrasound and Medical Services Limited. It is a diagnostic service located in Canvey Island, Essex. The service has one ultrasound scanning room, an office and a waiting area shared with patients who use other facilities located at the site.

The service has one registered location with additional services provided from five satellite clinics held at GP Practices based in Basildon, Brentwood, South Woodham Ferrers, Maldon and Southend.

The service provides diagnostic imaging through the use of ultrasound imaging to NHS and private patients aged 18 years and above. Modes of ultrasound scanning included but were not limited to; musculoskeletal, upper and lower abdominal ultrasound, kidney, bladder, scrotal transvaginal and thyroid.

This was the services first inspection since it registered with CQC in November 2016. We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out the inspection on 16 October 2018.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

The only service provided at this location was diagnostic imaging.

Services we rate

Our rating of this service was good overall.

We found areas of good practice in diagnostic imaging:

• The dedicated clinical room used for the patient scanning was clean, tidy and contained the appropriate resources which were stored correctly.
• Equipment maintenance and service records were fully itemised, organised and maintained.
• Appointments were scheduled to meet the needs and demands of the patients who required these services.
• There were processes in place for the escalation of unexpected findings during ultrasound scans. The service had developed links with the local NHS trusts to enable an onward referral for patients.
• Written feedback from patients was overwhelmingly positive.
• We also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:
• The providers submitted statement of purpose registered the service to provide diagnostic and screening services to people of 18 and above. Between the reporting period July 2017 to August 2018 the provider delivered these services to 179 young people between 16 to 18 years of age, which was outside the submitted statement of purpose. Once we highlighted this at the inspection the provider stated that they would no longer offer this service to young people between the ages of 16 to18 years.
• We found issues regarding the environment of the clinical room which did not fully support the privacy of the patient.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it must take some actions to comply with the regulations and that it should make other improvements. We also issued the provider with one requirement notice that affected diagnostic and screening procedures details are at the end of the report.

Amanda Stanford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals