Health Foundation grant to improve scan results

The Health Foundation’s Innovating for Improvement Programme has made a grant of £74,996 to Dr Fahmy Hanna and Prof Tony Fryer to improve the way unexpected test results are handled in the NHS.

Dr Fahmy Hanna

The three-year study focusses on Adrenal Incidentalomas, or AIs. As scanning with CT and MRI becomes more common, unexpected additional masses called AIs are increasingly being discovered. Whilst some may not need further testing and require no treatment, others could develop into cancer.

The team based at University Hospital of North Midlands Diabetes and Endocrinology Department will work in partnership with the University Hospital of South Manchester, and aims to find a new way of working that could be used across hospitals all over the UK.

Professor Anthony Fryer

Prof Fryer, Keele’s chair of Clinical Biochemistry in ISTM since 2008, said: “There is currently no recognised pathway for treating people with AI and it varies from hospital to hospital. This is a really innovative research project in that it could potentially change practice in the NHS because it is looking at ensuring the right tests are done at the right time and the right people get the information they need to help their patient.”

A new practical system to improve ways of working will be developed with a key innovation of an electronic management system (eAIMS) built in so that the project could then be rolled out in other NHS organisations.

Dr Hanna, Keele Honorary Clinical Lecturer and a UHNM Consultant and Endocrinologist said: “At UHNM there has been a four-fold increase in the number of scans over the last few years. The main benefit of having an electronic results system is that we hope to reduce what is an extremely stressful situation for patients who have found themselves in a potentially nightmare scenario of having a test for one condition that has then found something else for them to worry about.”