NCA’s Salford Royal Hospital rolls out Sectra PACS

Salford Royal Hospital, part of the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA), has rolled out the Sectra picture archiving and communication system (PACS)  for reporting on diagnostic imaging.

The system went live on 21 January 2025, enabling reporters and radiologists at the trust to use a single platform to both view and report on imaging studies, rather than having to navigate separate systems to provide reports that inform patient care, diagnoses and treatment.

Christian Kasmeridis, divisional managing director for imaging at the NCA, said: “This is a great opportunity for teams to come together to improve the patient experience and journey, by bringing our radiological services together across the Northern Care Alliance footprint.

“The feedback from the reporting radiological workforce has been extremely encouraging and the solution has been implemented by the dedicated staff in the department because of their commitment to improving patient care.

“We look forward to the implementation of the solution across all the GM trusts and the significant benefits of collaborative working to follow.”

The NCA’s hospital sites in Salford, Bury, Rochdale and Oldham are now live with the technology, providing patients and clinicians with faster results across the trust and connectivity for radiological studies across the sites.

Deployed as part of an enterprise imaging agreement signed with Sectra in 2020, PACS is already used by clinicians in NHS hospitals which are part of the Greater Manchester Imaging Network across the region to view, analyse and interrogate millions of patient scans including x-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds and MRI.

The technology is set to be rolled out across Greater Manchester throughout 2025 and 2026.

Some of the benefits expected as more trusts move to PACS-based reporting, include efficient storage solutions of medical images and critical patient data, which can be accessed and reported from any Greater Manchester site, to improve the patient journey and patient care.

Last year, Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust became the first organisation in the NHS to deploy Sectra’s enterprise imaging service using public cloud.

The deployment demonstrated that NHS patient imaging can be efficiently accessed from a secure public cloud environment, as quickly as when data is stored on-premises.