Medway Hospital exposed patients to radiation due to out-of-date machine
The hospital are investing nearly two million pounds into a newer replacement model due to its defect causing diagnoses to take longer and therefore exposing patients to more radiation.
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00:00 now. Oliver, what's led to this current situation?
00:05 So the machine is quite old as you heard out of date and it's been facing loads of faults
00:10 and breakdowns and due to its age it's quite difficult to get replacement parts. They're
00:14 having to use a second hand part at the moment which leads to all sorts of defects. For a
00:18 sense of how old it is, it still works on Windows XP and it has an end of life certificate
00:24 already issued all the way back in 2020. So quite an old machine. And these defects mean
00:30 that patients are having to be under the machine longer to get diagnosis because the imaging
00:35 software isn't quite where it should be. This means they're getting exposed to more radiation
00:40 and that means that they're going to be monitored. It is still within the upper limit of safe
00:44 radiation, but it is a risk that they don't say can go on for much longer.
00:51 What are the hospital doing to address this problem?
00:58 The hospital have committed to the £2 million that are required to get a new machine. They
01:03 say they will come in later this year in the summer. They say that patient safety is the
01:09 priority here and this new machine could actually improve patient safety at this hospital. It
01:14 could improve the diagnosis of things like prostate cancer. These machines are really
01:19 good for diagnosing cancer in a way that doesn't actually invade on the patient's safety. There's
01:28 no need for open surgery, no need to go to the emergency room for when you get diagnosed
01:33 using these machines. So hopefully it will improve things at the hospital, but for the
01:37 time being, they're going to have to use this old machine within a tight timeline until
01:45 the summer when this new machine will likely be put into effect.