New MRI unit at Fairfield General Hospital

The new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit at Fairfield General Hospital in Bury has been officially opened by His Worshipful the Mayor and Consort of the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, Councillor Mike Connolly and Mr Ian Hargreaves.

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs Fairfield, has invested over £2.2m on the new scanner and subsequent building work to house it.

S I Sealy were involved with the project, which included the installation of the new 1.5 Tesla Siemens Magnetom MR scanner, which will provide images for around 6000 patients a year.

The MRI Scanner was housed in a completely new building to link to the existing Radiology Department via a corridor link to enable waiting, preparation rooms and toilet facilities to form part of the Department. To enable the project to meet the tight design and construction period S I Sealy were asked to pre-design the services to ensure they could be adapted to suit two different MRI Scanners, and then finalise the services to tailor them with the Siemens Scanner, which was the final chosen scanner.

The new scanner required a completely new engineering services infrastructure from the main electrical hospital supplies, together with new air handling plant and chillers, which was formed as a plant room adjacent to the new scanner building.

Adaptations and modifications were included in the Radiology Department to extend the medical gases, fire alarm, nurse call, IT, security, access and domestic water facilities.

This project was completed while the hospital remained fully operational.