The clinical teams involved have shared their experiences in order to encourage others to improve local interventional radiology services.

“Key messages

• High quality IR services are essential for safe and effective patient care
• There is variation in provision of IR throughout England, particularly for potentially lifesaving emergency and out-of-hours procedures
• Despite this there are already many examples of good practice and service delivery across the country
• Networking will be essential to improve access to IR. There are challenges in developing effective operational delivery networks but there are already good examples of these in the UK
• A good well resourced IR service can contribute to significant savings (both financial and non-financial) along care pathways in both planned and emergency care
• The opportunity exists to use improvement techniques of standard work and visual management to create agreed standard operating procedures. This can support a network approach to providing on-call across a number of organisations.” p5

See the report: Towards best practice in interventional radiology. NHS Improvement – Diagnostics, June 2012.