Source · GIRFT National Specialty Report
Radiology
GIRFT Programme National Specialty Report on radiology
Published 1 November 2020
Radiology
Indexed content
20 recommendations
10 addressees
1 of 20 linked to a body
Recommendations
Trusts should review facilities and processes to ensure that patients are safe and are treated with dignity and respect at all times.
Imaging should be arranged at a time and place to suit patients and ensure their safety.
Reporting should be carried out expeditiously and at the point at which it will have maximum impact on the patient's care.
All radiology services should review their workforce requirements to ensure their establishment is correct. All services should maximise recruitment and retention and all staff should be supported to work to the top of their licence.
The RCR should produce standardised definitions for radiologist activities for job planning. This should also include expected volumes of activity.
Full addressee: RCR
The RCR and SoR should produce standardised competencies for reporting, so that once a trainee/radiographer has proved their skills, they are permitted to report independently, wherever they work.
Trusts should review the efficiency and management of MDTs in line with national guidance.
Standardised protocols should be introduced for imaging of common conditions for trusts and independent sector providers to adopt.
All trusts must meet the RCR standards for the use of IT.
Every trust or imaging network must have a sustainable plan for the purchase and/or replacement of capital equipment, PACS and RIS, to meet anticipated patient needs and increase capacity.
All radiology services should have access to dedicated facilities to admit and discharge day case patients for interventional procedures.
National bodies should review coding in radiology.
All trusts should be supported to standardise the submission of data to national data collections and access radiology data, linked to HES, whenever they wish to, for benchmarking and planning.
All trusts should anticipate and proactively manage their demand and capacity for both image acquisition and reporting, and for interventional radiology.
All referrers should adopt robust clinical pathways supported by clinical decision-making tools such as the RCR's CDS-enabled iRefer.
National bodies that produce clinical guidelines with a clinical interdependency with radiology must assess, prior to implementation, the impact on the speciality.
All trusts and networks should have policies around the management and governance of reporting capacity and costs of insourcing and outsourcing which are transparent.
All trusts should move to a network model of service delivery in line with the NHSE/I strategy.
Trusts should work with NHS partners to enable improved procurement of services, devices and consumables through cost and pricing transparency, aggregation and consolidation, and by sharing best practice.
Trusts should seek to reduce litigation costs by application of the GIRFT Programme's five-point plan.