Early Life Ultrasound Centre in Cheltenham, is operated by Early Life Ultrasound Centre Limited. Scans are provided for pregnant women from 16 years of age. The service provides a range of scans for pregnant women with scans taking place from seven weeks to full term. The service is provided to self-funding women across Cheltenham. These include, 3D/4D ultrasound imaging, early pregnancy/reassurance scans, endometrial lining scans and well-being scans.
The service also provides non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPTs) for pregnant women and caters for pregnant women who choose obstetric ultrasound services, in addition to routine antenatal ultrasound services or those who are undergoing fertility treatment abroad.
All women accessing the service are seen as private (self-funding) patients.
The service provides the single specialty core service diagnostic imaging. We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out a short notice announced inspection on 8 January 2020.
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 it as Good overall.
We found the following areas of good practice:
- Staff had the right qualifications and skills, received and completed mandatory training.
- Staff understood how to protect people from abuse and report incidents.
- The service had suitable premises and equipment.
- The service assessed and responded well to patient risk.
- The service followed national guidance, and staff followed consent legislation to make sure they were meeting the needs of the women who used the service.
- Providing a positive experience for women was central to the service. Staff cared for women and those close to them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect. Staff provided emotional support to women and those close to them to minimise their anxiety.
- Staff involved women and those close to them in decisions about their care and treatment.
- The service was responsive to the needs of women and their families and was tailored to pregnant women. People were able to access an appointment when they needed it.
- There was a vision for what the service wanted to achieve, and a positive culture was promoted that supported and valued staff. The service also engaged well with women and their families.
- The service had a system to identify risks and controls to reduce them, and cope with both the expected and unexpected.
However, we found the following areas required improvement
- Improvements were needed to some areas to control the risk of infection.
- The registered manager needed to familiarise themselves with the duty of candour regulation.
- We were not assured that policies were regularly reviewed and updated.
- There was a lack of documented evidence in appraisals to demonstrate discussions around performance or future development.
- Governance processes needed to be strengthened to enable the service to systematically improve service quality and safeguard high standards of care.
- The service did not adhere to Schedule 3 of the Health and Social Care Act to ensure safe recruitment.
However,
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, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. We also issued the provider with two requirement notices. Details are at the end of the report.
Dr Nigel Acheson
Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (South)