MRI safety: everyone's job

It seems that in most hospitals, the MRI department is the only department charged with ensuring MRI safety. Unfortunately, it took the tragic loss of a patient's life in a New York hospital has served to bring the topic of MRI safety forward in the minds of many healthcare leaders. Of course, safety in the MR imaging suite has long merited the attention it is now receiving. Medical professionals agree it should receive the very highest of priority. However, bringing that goal from concept to reality is a real challenge--one that St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston, Texas, accepted and met. Our success, we believe, resulted from promoting MRI safety as a hospital-wide concern and investigating and then implementing several specific measures to maximize patient safety. In addition to our own evaluation of existing procedures and policies, St. Luke's enlisted the help of two outside consultants to perform separate comprehensive MR safety evaluations of our facility. Among the suggestions offered by the consultants was improvement in our MRI safety form. Taking the safety form on the MRIsafety.com Web site as a guide, we made certain modifications to our form, then met with our nursing councils to gain their input. The result has been a dramatic increase in compliance. All MRI technologists must have the backing of management--and know that they have it. Management must empower the technical staff to adhere to safety principles, even when it means enforcing safety rules with physicians. Disseminating MR safety information to the appropriate personnel in a health facility can be a daunting task. We found video to be the most effective means of presenting MR safety information. Some MR vendors can supply a safety video that gives excellent examples of non-MRI safe equipment. The MR supervisor will find it beneficial to distribute the video to any department that might have access to the MRI suite. Today at St. Luke's, MRI safety is not a topic for annual review; instead, it is on the minds of our staff with each and every patient.