MRI Clinical Lead Darren Hudson co-authors a 3-year review of MRI safety incidents at InHealth

InHealth, the UK’s largest specialist provider of diagnostic and healthcare solutions, aims to make healthcare better by delivering high quality tests, scans, assessments and procedures. InHealths core values of trust, passion, care and fresh-thinking influences the healthcare providers actions and behaviour. The organisation delivers on promises, are passionate about helping patients, put patients first, and constantly strive for improvements to make healthcare better.

Darren Hudson, MRI Clinical Lead at InHealth, co-authored a recent review of MRI safety standards of InHealth alongside Professor Andrew P Jones, Christie NHS FT. The review was conducted over a 3-year period.

Following a systematic approach, Darren Hudson and Professor Jones used our internal incident reporting system to review data that was then categorised and analyzed for themes and trends. The main findings included the discovery that 7.5% of the total number of incident reports were associated with MRI safety-related events and 15.5% being MRI-related reports overall. A reporting rate of 0.05%, 1 per every 1987 patients treated, was discovered which concludes a low outcome. Referral of contraindicated devices and a failure in the screening process were the main causes of the incident reports. Advice and instructional materials have been developed to improve practice and limit the number of incidents. It was determined that categorisation of MRI-related safety events could allow organisation comparisons and provide insight into the state of MRI safety and open discussions around common MRI safety issues.

Darren Hudson, MRI Clinical Lead

“The most important aspect of working in MRI has to be safety, both for our patients and staff. Because of this it is important that we monitor incident reports for themes that may suggest failings in the processes, and then share the lessons learned to improve upon this. The review was a chance for us to look at our safety record during the 3 years I have been in post, and share some of the actions taken to help support safety in MRI across the organisation. We also hope that sharing what we have found across InHealth will also be of use to others and contribute in a small way to the literature base on MRI Safety.”