‘Night in A&E inspired me to provide x-rays on the move’

IMAGINE you are sitting in a leisure hotel in New York and you get a call from your elderly dad back in Ireland; there has been a horrible accident.

And imagine that you can pick up the phone, get him x-rayed without having to even think about a long painful wait in A&E, and go back to enjoying your holiday. Sorted.

That is just what Mary Jones thought while sitting in St Vincent’s Hospital at 2am. Her elderly father, who has Parkinson’s, had fallen badly and was waiting for a scan on his hip, amid the usual chaos of A&E at night.

Mary thought there must be a better way of having people in nursing homes x-rayed. She was a nurse manager of the eye department of a busy hospital but decided to leave her job of 32 years and focus on this project. A couple of years ago she founded Mobile Medical Diagnostics, the only mobile x-ray unit in Ireland.

‘Sitting in the emergency department in Vincent’s, I thought, “This is great and why hadn’t anyone thought of this before?”’ Mary recalls.

‘After doing a bit of research, I discovered that they have mobile x-ray units in Norway and Sweden, and they are a public service there, supported by their health system.’

The idea is not a modern one. During the First World War, Marie Curie operated 20 mobile x-ray units to treat soldiers on the Western Front.

However, there had never been a service like it in this country. Now, Ireland is a relative pioneer.

‘We are the only country in Europe, bar Norway and Sweden, that can offer this service. It benefits the public system as it reduces admissions to A&E and also reduces demand on ambulance service. It provides a better quality of service to our most elderly patients. It is performing the x-ray in a place where they feel most comfortable, which is important for patients with dementia.’

In Norway, the mobile x-ray service has been offered to Alzheimer’s patients since 2005 and is now available in all large urban centres for nursing home patients.

In the two years since its foundation, Mobile Medical Diagnostics has gone into 31 nursing homes here.

Work has dried up a little since the explosion of Covid-19 cases at nursing facilities in recent weeks, but as people are afraid of going to hospital, a mobile x-ray service has its advantages.

Mary says that PPE is used for each patient, whether Covid-19 positive or not, and the machine is given a deep clean after every use.

And Mobile Medical Diagnostics, who use consultant radiologists, can return scan results in four hours. ‘Even in Norway and Sweden, where they use this technology, there is usually a two-day lag time for the report. It is the same in Australia, where they have mobile units,’ Mary says.

Her husband came across the DMG Ireland campaign to provide small businesses with a €1million advertising fund across all DMG titles.

The couple felt the campaign might be a good way to make more people aware of the service they provide, especially if some are reluctant to go to hospital over relatively minor injuries such as fractures.

Just recently, they went out to a farmhouse in Athlone where an elderly patient required an x-ray. ‘It was the farmer’s daughter who contacted us from New York and asked could we go down to him because the last time he went to A&E he was there for a day and a half. Before we arrived back in Dublin, the report was with his GP.

‘This is a cost-effective way of doing it, and people with possible fractures aren’t clogging up A&E. And it is of great benefit to older people, because it is about making the patient more comfortable, and it means someone who is 90 years of age doesn’t have to sit in a waiting room all night.’

Mobile Medical Diagnostics does have a license to operate domestically and Mary is looking into the possibility of obtaining collapsible machines, so she can go into apartment blocks and flat complexes. With the pandemic, all of that is on hold.

However, having her company selected by DMG Media as part of its campaign for businesses affected by the pandemic means that they can avail of advertisements across the Irish Daily Mail, Irish Mail on Sunday, Extra.ie, EVOKE, mailonline and Rollercoaster.ie, which reaches 3.3million adults across Ireland every month.

More people might now become aware of Mary’s worthwhile venture and realise they don’t need to go to A&E for a suspected fracture.

‘Very few countries offer this service’