The Jack Brignall PET-CT Centre is operated by Alliance Medical Limited . The centre facilities include; reception and waiting areas; an administrative area, which includes a research office, and a clinical area. The clinical area includes two scanner rooms, eight uptake rooms, accessible male and female hot toilets (only to be used by patients who had their received radioactive injection) and two laboratories.

The service provides diagnostic imaging using PET-CT. A PET-CT scan is a combination of a PET (positive emissions tomography) scan and a CT (computerised tomography) scan. PET-CT scans are usually performed to help with the diagnosis, assessment and treatment of; cancer, heart and circulatory conditions and neurological (brain) abnormalities.

The centre did not scan children under 18 years due to lack of paediatric support on site

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out a short notice announced inspection on 1 March 2019.

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.

We rated the service as Good overall.

We found good practice in relation to:

The service had enough staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep people safe from avoidable harm and to provide the right care and treatment. We found good practice in relation to medicines management, record keeping, infection prevention and control and assessing and responding to patient risk.

The department had shown overall good compliance with the Ionising Radiation Regulations 2017 and Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations 2017, however some actions were needed.

Staff were competent in their roles and worked well together to provide good patient care. Care was provided using policies and procedures based on relevant national guidance and evidence-based practice. Effectiveness of care was monitored and benchmarked against other Alliance Medical Limited providers to maintain and improve standards.

Staff cared for patients with compassion. Feedback from patients confirmed that staff treated them well and with kindness. Patients told us all staff were helpful and understanding, informative, polite, reassuring and explained things well.

The service planned and provided services in a way that met the needs of their patients. Staff ensured patients’ individual needs were met. Patients could access the service when they needed it, appointments were prioritised and reports were made available to referring clinicians in a timely way.

The aim of the service was; to provide high standards of diagnostic imaging to meet the needs of referrers and their patients. The manager monitored service performance and engaged well with patients, customers, commissioners and staff to ensure they met this aim. The service had good systems in place to identify risks and plan to eliminate or reduce them and was committed to learn from when things went wrong or well. The manager of the service had the right skills and abilities to run the service providing high-quality sustainable care.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider should improve:

The service did not have a second radiation protection supervisor.

Categorisation of incidents and implementation of recommendations from incident investigations and quality assurance reviews needed to improve.

Where suggestions had come from patient surveys there needed to be some mechanism for informing patients what improvements had been made from their feedback or that their ideas had been considered but the service had not been able to progress them and why.

Patients sometimes had to have their scan rearranged due to problems escorting them from inpatient wards to the department in time for their scan.

There had been a gap of several months when there had been no staff meetings at the centre.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make some improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. Details are at the end of the report.

Ellen Armistead

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (North)