Leigh Infirmary, part of Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, has installed a new direct radiography room from Agfa Healthcare.
The DR room, which uses Agfa’s DX-D 600 system, was installed in December 2012, and has already improved throughput at Leigh, which has a GP-led walk-in centre and sees a lot of outpatients.
Andrew Beatty, the trust’s radiology directorate manager, said: “You can easily get a third more patients through a DR room than you can a conventional room.”
The trust went out to tender through NHS Supply Chain in May 2012. Several suppliers were considered.
One of the reasons for choosing Agfa Healthcare was that the trust had already deployed Agfa computed radiography on all three of its hospital sites, and staff were familiar with Afga’s NX interface.
“The training implications were minimal, as every member of my staff is familiar with NX,” said Beatty.
The implementation, which was managed by Agfa, went smoothly, he added: “It was a turnkey project. We had no issues with the installation – the project was on time. It’s been faultless since.”
About a hundred patients a day are seen at the new DR room. The advantage it offers over the CR system previously in place is that it is a “much slicker” process, said Beatty.
“The member of staff no longer needs to leave that area to go and view an image, process an image, and send it to PACS.
“We don’t have to ask the patient to wait outside, and we don’t have to find somebody to stay with them while we leave them to go and look at an image on a workstation somewhere.
“Within seconds, you get a diagnostic quality image displayed to the radiographer who can instantly decide whether the image is accurate and whether it’s been correctly positioned, and they can tell the patient straight away that they can leave.”
The trust also plans to use the Agfa solution to carry out full leg full spine examinations for orthopaedic patients, which are currently carried out at Wrightington.
The use of the DR room will speed up the process, said Beatty. “There is no more changing cassettes or repositioning of the tube.
“You just position the patient, centre the tube and ask it to do a full spine long leg and the machine will do it for us, and then it automatically stitches the images together, so straight away the radiographer is presented with the full image.”
The DR room has improved experiences for both patients and staff, added Beatty. “At the moment, in terms of ease of use, and image quality, we’re setting the benchmark in the trust.”