Re-modelled CT unit quickly up to speed

The new CT scanning facility was developed by Asteral via an MES agreement, elements of which included two new CT scanners, major refurbishment of the existing building, and ongoing maintenance and finance. As HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports, despite a tight two-month schedule, the project team’s expertise, and meticulous co-ordination and planning, enabled the delivery of a significantly enhanced facility on time and on budget with minimal disruption and without a single day’s scanning being lost.

London’s largest single site district hospital, Kingston Hospital is situated 12 miles from the centre of the capital, and serves a patient population of around 320,000 in Kingston, Richmond, Roehampton, Putney, and East Elmbridge. The hospital has approximately 520 beds, and directly employs around 2,750 staff, with a further 300 employed by contractors working on behalf of the Kingston Hospital NHS Trust. The Rowan Bentall wing, a single-storey unit completed in 1993, houses part of the hospital’s sizeable Radiology Department, which incorporates both MRI and CT scanning facilities. Currently around 60% of those CT scanned are outpatients, with the remaining 40% inpatients. According to radiology manager Jim Weir, in a “typical” day – the Radiology Department undertakes scanning six days a week – around 50 patients are scanned to facilitate diagnosis and treatment of everything from acute orthopaedic conditions to cancer and stroke. Prior to the recent installation of two new GE scanners – an Optima CT 660 64-slice machine, and a BrightSpeed Elite 16-slice CT scanner (both incorporating GE’s ASiR technology – see panel), the department had relied entirely on its existing 8-slice GE LightSpeed Ultra scanner, installed in 2002. However, as Jim Weir explained when I visited the new CT facility, the LightSpeed had been subject to the “intensive use day-in, dayout” typical for such a key diagnostic tool in a large and busy district hospital. This, coupled with a desire to equip the department with newer CT scanning equipment featuring the latest technology, and the practical difficulties encountered when the existing scanner had occasionally broken down, led to a project team being established in 2008 to mastermind its replacement, and the remodelling of the CT Department to improve patient flow and “bring things up-to-date”. In this project CIMS was tasked with the pre-installation work for two new GE CT scanners, giving the hospital’s radiology department added resilience, and enabling it to better accommodate demand for CT scanning estimated to be rising by at least 10% year-on-year.

Waiting times analysed