While in Miami earlier this week, I visited the Mercy Hospital, a Christian hospital much like the hospitals that used to be be normal in Britain until they were taken over by the state in 1948.
Among the things I saw was a brand new 64 slice CT scanner made by Siemens which had been installed the day I arrived. This scanner can take an image much faster than the old 16 slice scanners. Among its advantages is the way it should be able to reveal pretty accurately the extent to which plaque is obstructing arteries. The blocking of the coronoary artery can lead to a heart attack and death.
The beauty of the CT Scanner 64 is that in a certain number of cases, there will therefore be no need to do an angiogram - an invasive and unpleasant test to discover the extent to which arteries are blocked.
This, in turn, means that those people who shied away from an angiogram and therefore were not accurately diagnosed, will now be able to get a good diagnosis without undergoing any unpleasantness. Lives will be saved.
The machine I saw, please recall, was in the only American hospital I visited on this trip. It seems likely that many American hospitals have this excellent new piece of equipment.
But will you, as an NHS patient, have access to this machine in the UK?
Yes, if you live in East Sussex and can go to the Conquest Hospital at St Leonard's-on-Sea. And maybe soon you will also have access to one in Colchester. There was big fuss about the one coming to East Sussex in January and it was said it would be the first one in Britain. By implication, there is no machine of this sort in London.
In other words, a voluntary hospital in a suburb of Miami now has a scanner of a sort that people in the very capital of the United Kingdom do not have access to.
This is one example of how the NHS is behind the curve in the giving its patients the benefit of the latest technology and treatments.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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