Alright, I don’t love the fact of being wrong, but my mission is to motivate improvements in MRI safety for patients, staff, and providers. I’m not the least bit interested in having the longest list of ‘I told you so’ moments, and I’m uncomfortable when someone applies the term ‘guru’ to me. I am openly, vocally, critical of organizations when I feel that they haven’t lived up to their obligation to reinforce MRI safety standards, so when one of them does well, I can’t tell you how happy I am to eat my prior words, and today is an example of that…
In stark contrast to the speed with which we expect to see medical technology advance, the more bureaucratic process of regulatory or accreditation tends to be more deliberative and… oh heck, I’ll just say it… glacial in its pace to keep up. Every once in a while, however, these efforts ‘sling-shot’ forward.
Much to my surprise (and delight), this is happening with the new Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities (or Guidelines, for short). Though the 2010 edition of Guidelines has only been published for about a month (and the publisher has been struggling to catch up on back-ordered copies), two states have already adopted the 2010 edition as their requirements for licensure.
A few weeks ago the announcements came down, CMS had ‘deemed’ three organizations to accredit the new classification of Advanced Imaging in order to be eligible for Medicare & Medicaid reimbursement: the American College of Radiology (ACR), the Intersocietal Commission, and the Joint Commission (TJC).
The other two have had modality-specific accreditation programs for years, so what was the TJC going to do? Well, they’ve released their accreditation criteria, and one of the most wonderful surprises is that MRI safety is more prominent than it is in either of the other two ‘imaging’ accrediting bodies!
How to pick just one when there are a number of alarming, tragic, and needless MRI accidents to choose from? Let’s look at one that we can help the reader better imagine, the case of a pair of flying scissors that had to be surgically removed from a technologist’s forehead…
OK, I’ve been reading too many headlines in supermarket check-out aisles, but what else is a guy with an overactive imagination supposed to come up with?
You see, back in 1983 when GE was going through their pre-market approvals with the FDA for their first commercial clinical MRI system, they indicated that MRI suite safety minimally required ferromagnetic detection pre-screening. The only problem was, it hadn’t been invented yet!
News broke the other day of a nurse in England who was in agony for three months following a routine surgery during which her gall-bladder was removed. Fearing an infection, she was sent for an MRI. Unfortunately, the MRI could not be completed as the magnetic field began torquing the 7-inch pair of forceps that had been left inside her abdomen during the surgery, causing excruciating pain! Click Here For The Follow-Up X-ray And The Rest Of The Story…
This week the settlement documents were released — closing the chapter on the lawsuit that arose from the seminal event in MRI safety, the 2001 oxygen tank fatality of then-six-year-old Michael Colombini.
It is the stuff of fabled oral-histories, often dismissed as MRI urban-legend. The patient is wheeled into the MRI room on a gurney that goes flying toward the scanner. “How on Earth could these accidents happen when we know about these risks,” the skeptics question? Almost never does more than a single fragment of information surface about these sorts of accidents and, without verification, nearly all accounts can be erroneously written-off as fiction. Or, that was until enough pieces fell into place to conclusively document a recent episode… Click Here To Read More About MRI Gurney Accidents…
Yesterday I was provided a copy of an anonymized MRI accident / incident report which described how an MRI patient wearing a ThermaCare HeatWrap (something of a self-warming patch for muscle aches) had the wrap pulled off of them by the magnetic attraction of the MRI.
ThermaCare HeatWrap Products Contain Iron And May Be Drawn Into MRI Scanners
