- Independent hospital
Cobalt Health
Assessment report published 9 June 2026
Contents
Ratings
Our view of the service
We carried out an unannounced, comprehensive assessment on 18 and 19 March with follow up remote interviews on 26 March 2026. The assessment looked at Diagnostic imaging which we have rated as Outstanding.
We carried out the assessment as the provider had not been inspected fully under our new methodology, although we did carry out a responsive, focussed inspection in 2024 where the service was rated Good in all key questions except responsive which was rated Outstanding.
Cobalt Health provides diagnostic imaging services to patients across Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester as part of their 3 counties NHS contract. Cobalt health also provides Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC) imaging at both the Gloucester CDC and Dudley CDC. Cobalt also provides lung screening services across Manchester, Hull, North Lincoln and Goole, and Luton and Thurrock. The service also provides a small number of scans privately.
The Cobalt Imaging Centre in Cheltenham opened in 2006. The centre provides Positron emission tomography–computed tomography (PET/CT) (a nuclear medicine technique), Computed Tomography (CT), 1.5 T and 3.0 T Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) (medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body), ultrasound and digital radiography. The service also provides a fleet of 14 mobile MRI and CT scanners plus 1 relocatable and 1 mobile PET/CT scanner which were located in various regions across the UK.
Between January 2025 and December 2025, across all sites, Cobalt Health provided 90280 scans across all modalities.
The service provides diagnostic imaging services for people over the age of 18 plus some limited services for children under the age of 18. Between May 2025 and April 2026, the service performed 380 scans for children, which equated to 0.004% of imaging done overall.
We visited the clinical imaging centre in Cheltenham and The Gloucester Quays community diagnostic centre.
Cobalt Health also provides consultation rooms for orthopaedic surgeons and neurologists to facilitate a one-stop service for outpatients, with diagnostic imaging carried out during the consultation.
Cobalt Health has another registered location in Birmingham called The Institute of Translational Medicine Imaging Centre at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH). This has its own registration and was not inspected as part of this assessment. This service was last inspected in June 2022 and rated Requires Improvement.