New MRI scanner to be installed at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital

A new MRI scanner will be installed at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH) this weekend as part of a £1.7 million investment.

The scanner – which aims to improve treatment and offer faster and more accurate information – will be installed at the Treatment Centre on Sunday 26 November. There is not expected to be any disruption to patients attending the hospital.

A second MRI scanner is to be installed at RSH by the end of March 2018 – thanks to generous funding by the League of Friends of the RSH. It will bring the total number of new MRI scanners to three – with the first craned into place at the Princess Royal Hospital (PRH) in Telford in August.

Glen Whitehouse, Radiology Centre Manager at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH), which runs the RSH and PRH, said: “The first of the two new machines for the RSH will be arriving on Sunday. The lift in is relatively simple compared to the recent install at PRH and there should be no disruption to our patients.

“There will be a small crane on the staff car park by the Treatment Centre which will be used to lift the scanner off the lorry, where it will be slid into an opening in the wall. Due to the installation being on a Sunday, we do not anticipate any impact on the availability for public parking.

“The new scanner will come into clinical use on 2 January 2018 when work will begin replacing the current machine. In April, the new MRI suite will be completed with the two new machines installed back to back. This will give us the vital capacity we need in order to meet the growing demand for this advanced imaging modality.”

The new state-of-the-art MRI scanners mean that patients will benefit from the most up-to-date technology, providing more advanced and high quality images as well as an enhanced patient experience with its wider bore. They also mean faster and more detailed examinations of almost any part of the body, the results of which can be used to help diagnose conditions, plan treatments and assess how effective previous treatment has been.