NHS brings mobile CT units to London for lung cancer screening

Londoners will now be able to get their groceries and lung screenings all in one place thanks to a new year-long National Health Service (NHS) England initiative that will bring mobile CT scanning units to West London supermarket parking lots.  

The £1 million ($1.3 million U.S.) pilot project will target more than 7,000 smokers or former smokers between the ages of 60 to 75 years in the U.K., according to a recent report by The Standard U.K.  

The mobile CT scanning units will be parked at a Tesco grocery store parking lot in West London for three months and then other locations yet to be determined.  

The results from the year-long trial will be used to decide whether the NHS should introduce a national screening program for lung cancer, the most common cause of death in the U.K.—often because of failure to make an early diagnosis, according to the article.  

“One of the essential elements of these pilots is to investigate how many patients have a CT scan,” lead researcher Anand Deveraj, MD, a consultant thoracic radiologist at Royal Brompton Hospital in the U.K., told The Standard. “It will help inform us how screening can be implemented on a national basis. We know that early detection from screening does save lives; we need to translate that into the real world.” 

Read The Standard U.K.'s entire article below. 

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A recent graduate from Dominican University (IL) with a bachelor’s in journalism, Melissa joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering all aspects of health imaging. She’s a fan of singing and playing guitar, elephants, a good cup of tea, and her golden retriever Cooper.

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