Strengthening safety in the MRI room

As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports, the new building features a head and whole body HD imaging CT scanner from GE, and a 1.5 T Philips Ingenia MRI scanner, as well as Ferroguard ferromagnetic detection equipment from Metrasens designed to ‘screen’ individuals about to enter the MRI scanning room for ferrous objects.

Having taken just to 10 months to complete, the new MRI and CT suite was officially opened by local MP, Steven Brine, and the chair of the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Elizabeth Padmore, on 14 June this year. The opening was attended both by many of the radiographers, radiologists, surgeons, nursing, and other clinical and administrative personnel who will use the facility, but also by Winchester’s Mayor and Mayoress, and by patients and other guests. One of the first personnel to be alerted to the fire in the former imaging suite on the afternoon of 9 December, 2011 – which was spotted by a maintenance engineer walking past the unit on his way home – was Dr Jeremy Hogg, medical director of the Foundation Trust’s Family and Clinical Support Services Division. He was in a meeting room near the MRI and CT scanning rooms when a colleague rushed in to tell him that smoke was coming from the building’s roof. Dr Hogg had been one of the key personnel on the project to design and build the MRI and CT facility around a decade earlier, and, during the construction of its replacement, acted as the principal day-to-day Foundation Trust contact with the main and sub-contractors. Other key members of the project team behind the impressive new building were Christine Saunders, clinical services manager of the Radiography Department; lead radiographer, Steve Ross; the Foundation Trust’s estates director, Paul Bond, and consultant radiologist, Julian Elford.

Staff and patients full of praise