25 September 2019

Patients at Shropshire’s two acute hospitals are set to benefit from a multi-million pound investment in state-of-the-art radiography services.

A new CT scanner will be installed at Princess Royal Hospital (PRH) in Telford as part of a £7 million investment in Radiology equipment across The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH), which will also include a full upgrade to digital x-ray equipment, a cardiac catheter laboratory and a vascular and interventional laboratory.

The building work forms a large scale programme of replacement spanning over 12 months, with the new CT scanner expected to go live in December.

A CT 320 Slice Scanner

The additional scanner will help SaTH, which runs PRH and The Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, to ensure the sustainable and reliable delivery of emergency and urgent CT scanning. Its superior technology will also allow for improved image quality and advanced imaging such as cardiac.

Glen Whitehouse, Centre Manager for Radiology at SaTH, said: “This is a significant investment for the hospital. The new scanner will provide excellent quality images at the lowest possible radiation dose to the patient using the latest scanning technology.

“The addition of a new CT 320 Slice Scanner to our expanding imaging service will greatly improve access to patients, improving referral to scan time which in turn improves clinical prognosis.

“The high specification scanner will also meet the demands of current growth in CT demand, and importantly for patients, it means they would not have to be transferred to another hospital site should the existing scanner break down or be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance.”

A CT – computerised tomography – scan uses rotating x-rays and a computer to create detailed images of the inside of the body such as the internal organs, blood vessels and bones.

They can be used to:

  • Diagnose conditions including damage to bones, injuries to organs, problems with blood flow, strokes and cancer
  • Guide further tests or treatment for example helping to determine the location, size and shape of a tumour before radiotherapy, or allowing a doctor to take a needle biopsy (where a small tissue sample is removed using a needle) or drain an abscess
  • Monitor conditions such as checking the size of tumours during and after cancer treatment

Paula Clark, Chief Executive at SaTH, said: “This will be a real boost for our patients and our radiology team.”