The new £15m Skegness Diagnostic Centre has opened to the public. Lincolnshire World was invited to tour the facility. Barry Robinson reports.
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00:00Skegness' new £15 million community diagnostic centre has welcomed its first patients and
00:07we were invited to have a look around.
00:10Barry Robinson reports.
00:12This is the CT scanner room and some of your friendly faces there will be helping you out.
00:23This is the control centre for the CT scanner.
00:30There's been a lot of progress since you were last given a glimpse of the development back
00:42in July.
00:43You must be delighted to be on schedule to open to the public?
00:46Oh it's just fantastic.
00:47I mean it's such a wonderful surrounding this community diagnostic centre in the middle
00:52of Skegness.
00:53It's a £15 million building, an investment never been seen before in Skegness and the
00:59wider surrounding area for people who need either a CT scan, an MRI, x-ray and we're
01:07stood now in what is our new chemotherapy area and we'll be opening this up next week
01:13to members of the public who need to have their blood taken before they have the chemotherapy
01:17treatment so it's just wonderful.
01:21And is there anything else you can tell us Karen about how this facility is going to
01:24benefit the local public?
01:27So it means, this facility means because it's in the middle of Skegness, currently before
01:32this facility was available, members of the public needed to travel to either Boston or
01:38to Lincoln to have their scans or tests done.
01:41Well you won't need to do that anymore, you'll be able to have those scans and tests here
01:45in Skegness in this community diagnostic centre.
01:49So it's a lot easier to get to, there's ample parking and the building itself is just wonderful.
01:57It's so modern, it's so light and airy and it's just a lovely place for you to come to.
02:04And we've created quite a number of jobs as well, 140 jobs have been across our programme
02:08of community diagnostic centres and we've employed local people from Skegness to work
02:14in this CDC and I've met some of them today and they're really excited to be here.
02:20The equipment here is state of the art, it's the best equipment that we've got with MRI
02:24scanners and CT scanners and they can be remotely accessed, they've got AI enabled and we can
02:31use them for a lot of teaching for our colleagues as well and believe me, our colleagues are
02:36grappling to want to come and work in the Skegness CDC.
02:40Now we did hear a little bit about the children one, the kitten scanner, now I take it you
02:49know about this, can you tell us a little bit about that because I was really excited
02:53to hear on that one.
02:55So we have a room here that's our family room where we'll have what's called a kitten scanner
03:00and it's effectively a mini MRI scanner for children and it's a scanner that children
03:07can take either a teddy bear or a dinosaur, they can place them into the scanner so that
03:14that teddy or that dinosaur toy has an MRI scan and that child can see what it's like
03:20so that when the child needs the MRI scan they can have that scan without having to
03:25have a general anaesthetic.
03:27These scanners are like tunnels when you go into them and for children it's incredibly
03:32frightening and before we had the kitten scanners we would have to give a child a general anaesthetic
03:37for them to lay on the bed and then go into the MRI scanner and that itself causes a lot
03:43of risk to children.
03:46Since we've had the little toy scanner that you can put teddy bear into, we've not needed
03:51to give a general anaesthetic to over 100 children that previously would have had one.
03:56So there you have it, kitten scanner, MRI scanner, CT scanner, it's all there.
04:02Thank you very much Professor, thank you very much and let's hope you don't have to end
04:07up here but if you do you'll be well looked after.
04:09We will, absolutely.