This is just one example of a laundry-list of serious projectile accidents that occurred in 2009.

I should note that the above isn’t a real X-ray of this injury, but hopefully it was ‘real enough’ to at least get you to swallow hard at the thought.

In this incident occurred when a technologist was positioning the patient on the table for the MRI exam. At that moment, the person who brought the patient to the MRI department entered the room with a pair of ferromagnetic scissors. The rest, as they say, is history.

But what about this one event makes it worth holding out as an example?

It, like the many other serious projectile injuries of last year, was completely avoidable. And the same is true for the burn injuries, and those that occurred as a result of incomplete clinical screening. These three causes are responsible for over 90% of the serious injuries in MRI.

Often these occur because the only accident protection in place is the vigilance of the technologist on duty (which, increasingly often, is only a single individual). When everything depends on that one, fallible, individual, the process will break down.

Effective clinical screening depends, in part, on the appropriate prescription of MR studies by primary care clinicians (more than half of which, according to a recent study, were unaware that medical implants were a contraindication for MRI exams). A review of the patient’s accurate medical records, effective pre-screening by scheduling staff, careful review of the patient’s screening form, all of which should be done to reduce the burden on the Technologist.

For burns, patients should be transported to MR without any extraneous monitors, equipment or devices. Upon arriving, they should be switched to MR Conditional monitoring equipment, as needed. The site should provide ample insulating and positioning pads to properly situate the patient for the exam. As with the preliminary screening steps, these will also reduce the burden on the Tech’s unblinking vigilance to prevent these types of accidents.

For projectiles, it isn’t realistic to keep a metal-free MRI suite. This means that the objects which can hurt patients or staff, and damage million-dollar scanners, are littered, like time-bombs, throughout our day. Changing patients, educating key support staff, implementing rigorous access controls, and using ferromagnetic detection can dramatically cut the risks associated with projectile accidents.

These preventative steps, above, have two things in common. First, their almost universally accepted as industry best practice. Second, they are universally omitted from any patient safety requirements! That’s right, no regulatory or accreditation body has objective standard requirements for screening, positioning, or projectile protection!

As long as these instances of head-piercing scissors, or leg-crushing gurney rides, or brain-damaging flying carts, or face-whalloping monitor panels, or any of the others, are viewed as just text descriptions of statistical aberrations, instead of easily-preventable human tragedies, we’ll stay stuck with ineffectual recommendations and scores of stupid, stupid injuries.

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Yes, that’s right, a recent news story from the NBC television affiliate station in Jacksonville, Florida, provides an account of how an off-duty police officer’s pistol wound up stuck to their MRI scanner, and cost the provider something in the neighborhood of $150,000 to remove!

You pretty much have to ignore the completely unintelligible explanation as to how MRI’s work or what would have caused the gun to be attracted to the MRI, but the underlying story of a police officer’s pistol getting stuck to the magnet (and pinning her hand to the scanner) again demonstrates the seriousness and frequency of MRI accidents.

And it’s not as though this is the first time. There are other, similar accounts, including this one in which the magnet caused the pistol to fire, despite the fact that the safety was engaged.

Perhaps, since the industry hasn’t taken any formal steps to improve patient screening with standard procedures or tools, we may have needed a reminder about the pervasiveness of screening accidents on the local newscast.

Screening lapses are nothing new. Time and time again we demonstrate that an exclusive dependence upon the vigilance of MR Technologists is not the most effective way to prevent these accidents. Patient safety, and the protection of millions of dollars of MRI equipment should come from layers of protection.

Additional layers of protection, such as ferromagnetic detection, aren’t an indictment of our Technologists, they’re necessary supports to help ease the burden on Techs and provide the greatest protection possible to patients, visitors, and millions of dollars of MRI equipment.

PS: Though this isn’t a picture of the account in this story, the image below is of a gun, or more precisely a pistol, drawn into an MRI scanner. Between the photo, below, the newscast from Jacksonville, and the journal article linked above, clearly these pistol-versus-MRI accidents aren’t unheard of.