Background to this inspection
Updated
17 October 2019
Epsom Alliance MRI Unit is operated by Alliance Medical. The unit opened in January 2000 and Alliance Medical have been providing the service since. The service works under a dual policy agreement with the host trust to provide MRI scanning for the local Epsom community. The opening hours have been 8-8, 7 days a week since 2010. The service scans around 25 patients a day, inpatients and outpatients, for a variety of different MRI procedures. The service is unreported but works closely with the radiologists and other trust staff to deliver a "joined up" end to end process when dealing with two-week rule and urgent referrals.
This was the first inspection of the service under the CQC’s comprehensive inspection programme.
The service has had a registered manager in post since 10 January 2011.
Updated
17 October 2019
Epsom Alliance MRI Unit is operated by Alliance Medical.
The service provides diagnostic imaging. We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out an unannounced visit to the service on 26 February 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.
The only service provided was diagnostic imaging.
Services we rate
The service had not previously been rated. We rated it as Good overall.
We found good practice in relation to diagnostic imaging
Staff used a technique called ‘feed and wrap’ if there was a young child that was attending for a scan. Staff would put a sign up asking people in the unit to keep quiet as there was a baby trying to sleep.
Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve.
Nigel Acheson
Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals Acute