Shropshire's hospitals secure scanners for further six months in a bid to tackle patient backlog by July
Shropshire's major hospitals will be allowed to keep two mobile MRI scanners for another six months in a bid to reduce a waiting list backlog by July next year.
The board of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) approved the £1 million plan during a meeting yesterday.
It comes as bosses say the hospitals also saw a peak in Covid activity last month – up to 60 per cent above the levels experienced in April, alongside high demand for urgent care services.
A report to the board said 109 beds, almost a fifth of those available, were either occupied or out of use due to Covid or infection control reasons on November 17, with the number of coronavirus inpatients predicted to rise.
The trust, which runs Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, lost a significant proportion of its MRI scanning capacity after the coronavirus outbreak, resulting in a backlog of 3,846 patients waiting for a scan by October.
In the past few months, two mobile MRI scanners were secured to try and reduce the backlog.
And the trust's board has now approved plans to extend the contract to keep them for a further six months, with the aim of eliminating the waiting list by next July.
Nigel Lee, chief operating officer at SaTH, said: "We've had significant impact in a number of our different areas, in particular of our elective work including cancer.
"We're really trying hard to accelerate the work we are doing and bring our backlogs down and therefore minimise potential harm.
"The MRIs, we've had two mobile units that became available September time.
"We secured one which started in October, one which started in November. They were for an initial period of three months.
"What I'm asking the board to do is support us in extending those for a further six months.
"The reason for that length of period is twofold – the first is we are starting to make inroads into reducing our waiting lists and there's been a lot of analysis on how we need to continue to do that; the second one is that SaTH has been successful in securing national capital for a new CT and a new MRI which is currently being procured.
"We are looking for that to come into operation in May or June.
"This would see us a significant part of our diagnostic capability really driving the backlog down."
To deal with the pressures of coronavirus last month, head and neck services were relocated at PRH to create an additional Covid high risk ward, a report to the board says.
Dr Catriona McMahon, chair of the trust, said SaTH is also using 'pop-up isolation rooms'.
She told board members: "These are the rooms or the facilities that we now have a dozen of in the trust which allows us to pop up isolation rooms anywhere in the trust that we need, to have the opportunity to protect, either protect other patients from a patient who is undergoing an aerosol generating procedure and is negative but still we have to take the precautions, or those who are positive."
