By Philips ∙ Featuring Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust ∙ 31 July 2024 ∙ 9 mins
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust faces challenges common to many healthcare organizations today: having enough skilled technologists across sites to meet the demand for imaging exams, particularly for more complex exams such as cardiac MR. The Trust conducted a 12-month pilot with the virtual support solution Philips Radiology Operations Command Center to assess whether use of Radiology Operations Command Center is a scalable solution that could reduce training time, increase radiographer capabilities and increase the number of radiographers who are trained in cardiac MR. Goals were to reduce the average scan time for cardiac scans and also reduce the number of recalls, rescans and repeated sequences. Discover firsthand insights from the Imperial team. Watch the video now for an exclusive peek into their experiences.
“We’ve doubled the number of staff that we can train in the same period by using Radiology Operations Command Center. A super user can come in, access the command center and within a minute they’ve got viewing access to multiple scanners across multiple sites, and that’s pretty unique.”
Clinical Director (London Imaging Academy) and Practice Educator
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
London, UK
Radiology Operations Command Center is also worthwhile for expert radiographers because it promotes their expertise and gives them new opportunities to effectively share their knowledge with colleagues in the sector, in the region and around the country. It’s valuable to patients because time saved during a scan is less time spent inside the scanner. Gregory points out the benefit of staff retention as well. “It means that all radiographers have the opportunity to upskill,” he says. Because Radiology Operations Command Center is vendor-neutral, it can be used to efficiently train radiographers on different systems in different locations, which aids workforce mobility within NHS.
“I think the most unexpected thing for me with this technology is how easy it is to use. I could log on, I could view, I could supervise. It is actually quite a user-friendly technology. Speaking for the colleagues who have used it as a trainee, they felt a lot of support from the super users.”
Clinical Services Manager, Imaging
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
London, UK
“I’ve been able to sit with three different scanners in the background and I can help three different colleagues as they go through their scans... I do think it has a positive impact on the confidence of the radiographers that are training.”
Practice Education Facilitator
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
London, UK
“We can talk about the physics, and we can talk about the weightings because there's almost guarantee between three different screens that there will be a T2 on one of them, a T1 on one of them and if there isn't there'll be another one in 30 seconds. So, it's quite good as a teaching tool where in real time there's enough that's changing and enough for me to talk about, so that we can really get into what can be a very difficult modality for them to understand. In terms of the technology, the physics and the anatomy, it's just so different than plain film.”
White paper
[1] NHS England VST Pilot Programme
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