Lakeside Medical Diagnostics is operated by Lakeside Medical Diagnostics Limited. 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 three satellite clinics held at NHS community facilities based in Billericay and Waltham Cross.

The service provides diagnostic imaging through the use of ultrasound imaging to NHS patients aged 16 years and over. Modes of ultrasound scanning included but were not limited to; musculoskeletal, upper abdominal ultrasound, urinary tract renal ultrasound, scrotal, transvaginal and vascular ultrasound. We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out an unannounced inspection on 3 December 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 was diagnostic imaging.

Services we rate

Our rating of this service was Requires improvement overall.

We found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve;

• There was a lack of effective systems in place to oversee the governance process.

• There were no effective processes in place to oversee the servicing of ultrasound equipment.

• Equipment maintenance and service records were unorganised. Servicing records where illegible in places.

• We found inconsistencies in the consent process, seven out of the 18 medical care records reviewed did not have written consent.

• We could not gain assurance that risks within the service were regularly reviewed and managed owned by staff.

However, we found good practice in relation to:

• The dedicated clinical room used for the patient scanning was clean, tidy and contained the appropriate resources which were stored correctly.

• Appointments were scheduled to meet the needs and demands of the patients who required these services.

• Staff interactions with patients were supportive and professional.

• The service had direct access to electronic information held by community services, including GPs. This meant that hospital staff could access up-to-date information about patients, for example, details of their current medicine.

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 to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with one requirement notice that affected diagnostic and screening services. Details are at the end of the report.

Amanda Stanford

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals.

We planned to conduct our inspection on a day when people were using the service. However, the provider's opening times, as listed on its website, were out of date and when we arrived we found that it was closed to patients. As we were unable to speak directly with people, we reviewed people's views from patient surveys, which were conducted monthly. These showed that they were very happy with the service being provided.