Quality you can trust, independently assured

Pillar one: clinical leadership

Clinical judgement, never overridden

Medical Imaging Partnership was founded by radiologists, and clinical leadership still sits at the top of the organisation rather than alongside it. Our Chief Medical Officer, Dr Ynyr Hughes-Roberts, leads clinically, and a Medical Director and radiology leadership own clinical policy, imaging protocols and clinical escalation. Where a clinical decision and a commercial one pull in different directions, the clinical decision stands.

Clinical governance reports to board level with a standing quality agenda, so quality is discussed by the people who set the strategy and hold the budget rather than being delegated downwards. Our integrated governance committee meets at least four times a year, monitoring clinical governance across the group and considering clinical and health-and-safety matters. The Chief Executive and senior staff with clinical responsibilities attend.

That structure is what allows a commissioner to hold one organisation accountable for a whole service: the same clinical policy applies whether the scan happens in one of our centres, in a mobile unit on a hospital site, or in a partner's facility that we run as a managed service.

Pillar three: radiation safety

IR(ME)R governance across every modality

Ionising radiation is the part of imaging where governance is least optional. We operate full IR(ME)R governance, the framework that requires every medical exposure to be justified before it happens and optimised when it does, with appointed Radiation Protection Advisers and Radiation Protection Supervisors supporting our clinical and radiographic teams.

Exposure protocols are written, followed and audited, and doses are optimised across every modality we operate. Because our fleet moves, the same protocols and the same oversight travel with it: a mobile CT parked on a partner's site works to the standards that apply in our own centres, not to a looser local arrangement.

Radiation safety also shapes triage. Our referral centre triages every request to the appropriate modality, which means a patient is not exposed to ionising radiation when a scan without it answers the clinical question.

Pillar four: reporting quality

The report is the product, so the report is what we audit

A scan has no value until it has been read well. Images are reported by subspecialists working in their own field, whether that is MSK, neuro, uro-radiology, cardiac or oncology, rather than by a generalist rota taking whatever arrives next.

That subspecialist model is held in place by peer review. Discrepancy meetings examine cases where reports differ from the eventual clinical picture, and double-reading programmes place a second pair of eyes on the work. Discrepancy rates are monitored rather than merely recorded, because the point of measuring them is to change practice. Report quality and turnaround are under continuous audit.

We also hold ourselves to what a report does, not only whether it is accurate. Every report carries a clear recommendation and onward route, RAG-rated so that green supports discharge and self-management, amber directs the patient to the right level of review, and red triggers immediate escalation. Where a scan shows something urgent we escalate it to the referrer promptly rather than waiting for the routine report to work its way through.

Pillar five: learning & candour

What we do when something goes wrong

Any organisation can describe its governance while things are going well. The test is what happens when they are not. We work to the duty of candour: when something goes wrong we tell the patient and the referrer, we explain what happened, and we say what we are changing as a result.

Incidents are reported openly and reviewed in a structured way, and the learning is shared across all our sites rather than staying with the team involved. Patient safety alerts are cascaded across the group. Complaints run through the same loop: they are not problems to be managed but evidence of where the service is failing somebody, and the actions that come out of them feed back into policy.

Safeguarding sits in the same pillar. We are fully committed to protecting adults, children, young people and looked-after children, and all healthcare staff have a duty to recognise and respond to concerns. Our policies are regularly reviewed in line with national guidance.

Pillar six: measurement

Measured from the perspective that counts

Traditional metrics tell you what happened. They do not tell you whether it mattered. Alongside operational measures such as referral-to-scan interval and scan-to-report turnaround, we collect Patient Reported Outcome Measures covering symptom impact, reassurance and anxiety reduction, and diagnostic value, and Patient Reported Experience Measures across six domains, from access and communication to compassion, environment, safety and overall experience.

The data is reviewed weekly at site level, monthly at pathway level and quarterly at board level, which closes the loop back to the first pillar: the people accountable for quality are the people who see the numbers. Friends and Family Test results are reviewed on the same footing.

We publish the targets we hold ourselves to, and we use the evidence. Where it shows that community-delivered pathways match or beat hospital equivalents on outcomes and experience, we use it to make the case for further community investment.

See the measures and the targets we hold ourselves to →