We visited a very happy Respiratory Medicine team who were so pleased to show us the bronchoscope we had purchased for the department following their successful bid to the Friends. Additional equipment was considered essential in order to increase the number of diagnostic procedures which consultants could perform for patients on the lung cancer pathway. The Friends donation will ensure more patients are able to be seen quickly, and that any cancers are diagnosed, and consequently treated, faster. This will result in better outcomes for patients who do go on to require treatment.
Amanda Stern, Service Manager for Respiratory Medicine explained, “We currently run diagnostics procedures at EDGH to help with early diagnosis of suspected lung cancer. We currently run Bronchoscopy and Endobronchial ultrasound procedures however, we are limited to how many of these we can do as the scopes require full infection-controlled clinical cleaning in between patient procedures. Therefore we are limited to about four procedures per day as the cleaning takes time. Obtaining a new scope of each procedure will allow us to increase the capacity of patients that we can perform on per week by at least 4-6 patients- thereby increasing the performance of our wait times for patients resulting in earlier diagnostics results and, if needed, earlier treatment for any found cancers. The benefits to patients are significant and we thank the Friends for their amazing generosity.”
