A key development at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH), east of England, has seen a change in the role of radiology assistants: They now help to prepare patients for radiology scans and look after them -- work previously undertaken by radiographers. The change now allows radiographers more time to concentrate on scanning patients, resulting in faster scanning with quicker…
Above average grades or lots of patience - whoever wants to study medicine in Germany needs at least one of the two. That’s because some 40,000 school graduates apply for just 9,000 places to study medicine every semester. The coveted places are assigned by the central office for university admissions (ZVS): 20% go to the top graduates, 20% are granted on the basis of a waiting list, and 60%…
What a success! On 6 March, ECR meeting room K was filled to capacity when congress president Professor Małgorzata Szczerbo-Trojanowska opened the Hospital Management Symposium 2010 (HMS). The number of pre-registrations bore witness to HMS’ high reputation. Many ECR participants had immediately the HMS time bracket in their agendas in order not to miss the new developments in “Management,…
Professor Jörg F. Debatin, MD MBA, Medical Director and Chairman of the Board of University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) opened the session with his presentation “The role of radiology in the strategic planning of medical centres”. He discussed possibilities to effectively explore the hidden potential of diagnostic radiology services.
No more healthcare myopia! Although Szabolcs Dorotovics, MD MBA and Managing Director for Global Ventures at Johns Hopkins Medicine International, Baltimore, USA, is not an ophthalmologist, he urged the HMS audience to put on their specs and look beyond institutional, national and cultural borders and boundaries.
At this year’s HMS, André Hoppen, MD MSc, Sales Manager for VR MEDICO, Germany, looked at the most important decision-making criteria from the perspective of a financial services provider. “Finding out whether a new MRI or CT scanner will pay off is only possible by asking specific questions”, he said.
"Digital technology has come a long way: today, it is easy to produce thousands of radiological images – but who will read them?" Good question. In her presentation, Maria Lohm, MSc, Manager of RadiologiResurs AB, Unilabs AB, Sweden, provided an answer. Her company Unilabs offers teleradiology services as an excellent alternative in times of radiologist shortage.
Increasingly, hospitals have to find ways to optimise the capacity, efficiency and utilization of their MRI services. David Wormald, Integrated Assistant Vice President for Diagnostic Services at Hamilton Health Sciences & St. Joseph's Healthcare, Hamilton, Canada, knows this problem in and out – and a few solutions on top of it.
"The problem between information technology and medical engineering may stem from sequential processing and intermeshing", Peter Gocke, MD, said. Sounds difficult? But the real difficulty in the “Cooperation between IT and Medical Engineering (ME)” is something seemingly mundane: “At the end of the day collaboration is the target achievable”, Gocke, who is IT director at the University…
The introduction of digital imaging in all fields of radiology and digital workflow using RIS and PACS has led to fundamental changes in the daily work of radiologist. Professor Davide Caramella, MD, Associate Professor of Radiology, University of Pisa, Italy, described how IT supports radiologists in their daily work and why radiologists need to keep up-to-date in IT.
How can speech recognition become a workflow improver instead of a road to frustration? Kaye Bonython, Programme Manager, Imaging Informatics & OSL, HCA’s Portland Hospital for Women and Children, really knows: She has driven a series of PACS-related enhancements in HCA organisation, including group-wide speech recognition reporting – that was in 2006. Now, 99.98 per cent of reports at HCA…
The global nursing shortage is due in part to a lack of faculty in nursing schools and to a phenomenon known as nurse migration, where nurses leave their country of origin to work elsewhere. In response, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) and the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI), supported by The Elsevier Foundation, will conduct the Global Summit on Nurse…
Some of the most controversial issues in urology will be discussed by leading experts during the five-day 25th Annual Congress of the European Association of Urology (EAU) in Barcelona (ES). From April 16 to 20, close to 12,000 participants and 3,000 company representatives are expected to gather in one of the world’s biggest annual professional meetings in urology.
Under constant and continuing debate, and given the increasing use of CT and interventional imaging, the issue of radiation dose management was the focus of an ECR session with Dr Manthos Koutalonis, Medical Physicist at the Barts and The London NHS Trust – Radiation Safety Group, as moderator and presentations by three key speakers.
While biomarkers are acknowledged as useful tools in the early assessment of patient response to treatment, radiologists are less clear on how they can be applied in clinical practice. The ECR session Biomarkers: new word, new world, new work? explored a number of new applications for biomarkers with senior radiologists discussing their relevance in different areas.
Claudia Wild PhD (Phil.), Director of the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for Health Technology Assessment in Vienna, Austria, studied communications & psychology at the University of Vienna and political sciences at the Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, USA.
Prior to the imaging workshop , Meike Lerner asked programme organiser, Professor Thomas M Deserno (Dept. of Medical Informatics, RWTH) about current developments today and how they affect future input from imaging manufacturers.
The European Patients Forum (EPF) redesigned its website as a vital communication tool for its members and for the health community as a whole. This decision resulted in an improved website which offers a fresh new look that technically provides its online visitors with significant improvements in navigation and easier accessibility for users with disabilities. EPF President Anders Olauson…
Two Hitachi bundles, Discovery and start-up, which are currently only available in Germany, have been produced to enable more effective storage management. ‘Specialised consulting packages help medical facilities to achieve a reduction of costs caused by the deployment of more data-intensive diagnostic technologies or archiving regulations,’ the firm explains.
In an address inviting nurses and doctors to attend the 12th Düsseldorf International Endoscopy Symposium, held from February 5-6, Professor Horst Neuhaus and Dr Brigitte Schumacher outlined the events to be held for gastroenterologists, oncologists, internists, surgeons, interventional radiologists, nurses, trainees, students and industry representatives.
The idea of publishing a Textbook of Cardiovascular Imaging which accumulates the expertise of European cardiovascular imagers, is long awaited. The new textbook by the European Society of Cardiology is written with a patient rather than technology-based approach, helping clinicians to explain the condition to the patient, with the aid of imaging.
Clinical laboratory scientists, the medical technologists of the 21st century, are not only enjoying a rapidly expanding role in clinical work but are also increasingly undertaking non-clinical duties such as consultation, quality assurance, laboratory management, professional advocacy and education.
NAVA is a new mechanical ventilation method in which the ventilator is controlled directly by the patient's neural breath control, and is incorporated in Maquet´s Servo-i system.
Every November the exhibition centre in Düsseldorf becomes a beehive of activity for four days, when 17 halls are transformed into the biggest market for medical technology worldwide. The figures speak for themselves: more than 4,300 exhibitors – including the smallest newcomers to the global giants – cover almost 120,000 square metres where they will face thousands among the 136,000…
How can postoperative delirium and postoperative cognitive dysfunction be avoided? How is it best to address the problem of epilepsy? How can anaesthetists cope better with a patient death under anaesthesia? These difficult questions were among many addressed by specialists at HAI 2009, the annual conference of the German Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (DGAI). Report:…
