Hospital buys life-saving scanner

Walsall Manor Hospital has spent £600,000 on a new life-saving body scanner which will help detect potentially fatal illnesses like cancer.

The cutting-edge Computerised Tomography (CT) scanner is being delivered later this week to the hospital, in a move which bosses believe will help save hundreds more lives.

Providing a much higher image quality than existing equipment, the new piece of kit will enable a range of tests in a single scan.

Operating for outpatients from Monday to Friday, and offering an emergency service 24 hours-a-day, seven days a week, 11,000 patients will be tested by the scanner annually.

Jo Lydon, acting manager in the Manor's imaging department, said the equipment would be housed in a refurbished room.

This would give patients waiting to have scans the benefit of new inpatient and outpatient areas.

"The new scanner generates images in a fraction of the time compared to our old scanner promoting a better service for our patients," she said.

"Delivery of this new scanner is exciting for the whole team, allowing us to perform high quality examinations in a fully refurbished suite.

"Waits on CT scans at the Manor, along with all other scans remain well within guidelines and are among the best in the region."

It is hoped the scanner will pick up conditions including lung and bowel cancer, stroke, blood clots in the chest, and broken bones.

Computerised Tomography (CT) uses x-ray equipment and a computer to create detailed images of the inside of the body such as bones, soft tissues and the brain.

The images are black, white and grey and can be seen in three dimensions. The images are either stored on film or kept in a digital format and shown on a computer screen.

CT scans can help look for signs of inflammation, disease or cancer and monitor many other health conditions and are routinely done as an out-patient procedure.

The scanner is a large machine with a hole in the centre like a ring. The patient is positioned on a table so that the part of the body to be scanned is in the centre of the scanner.

The table then moves backwards or forwards very slowly while the X-ray unit rotates around the patient to help produce images from all directions.