The Isle of Man’s brand new MRI scanner is now in place at Noble’s Hospital.

It is the final piece of equipment in the island’s state-of-the-art cross-sectional scanning suite at Noble’s Hospital.

This has required a major six-month building programme by the DHSC to provide an area separate from the main radiography department with high-spec rooms for the new equipment and changing rooms for patients.

Through all this the radiology staff have had to keep the service going with the existing machines in place.

Chief radiographer, Kathleen McDowall, who coordinated the project, said: ’Stopping the service just wasn’t an option. The cost of getting a mobile scanner would have been astronomical. They’ve been working wearing earphones and hard hats in order to keep the service going.’

The machines which have been purchased for the new suite are so advanced they come with very specific requirements for the rooms in which they are to be accommodated.

The state-of-the-art MRI scanner, for example, purchased by the Henry Bloom Noble Healthcare Trust at a cost of £1.2 million has to be housed in a room lined with copper, to shield it and prevent any corruption of the images.

The two dual energy CT scanners both have to have their rooms shielded to contain radiation.

The CT scanners, which have been in place since May, were bought by Manx Breast Cancer Support and Mannin Cancers, which launched a massive fundraising drive to raise the £1.5 million required.

The difficulties for the radiology staff of carrying on the service while the building works were going on around them only increased with Covid-19.

Both the CT and the MRI scanners required a team of specialist engineers to come to the island, to check and test the machines and get them up and running.

This would have been impossible during the lockdown if Kathleen and several members of her team had not taken a course in swabbing and worked alongside the team in pathology so that could they check the engineers themselves for possible infection.

And, unlike some other departments in the hospital, Covid-19 has actually increased their workload, as Kathleen explains: ’Covid has actually brought about an increase in demand for the service for reasons such as patients being unable to travel to the UK.’

According to some estimates it may take as long as seven years for the NHS in the UK to deal with the backlog in appointments caused by the pandemic so the new machines could not have come at a better time as the Isle of Man now has the capability to do the more complex scanning which patients would previously have needed to go across for.

The department’s clinical lead consultant radiologist, Vanina Finocchi, has paid tribute to the whole team in the radiology department for the way they have carried on and brought the project to fruition.

She said: ’The DHSC was very supportive but to keep everything going was a miracle. It was hard work on the ground to pull all this together and great teamwork.

’This was something that everybody was very emotional about because everybody believed in it so much.

’The clinical staff drove it and put their hearts and souls into it.

’It’s one of the best projects I’ve ever worked with.’