Surrey and Sussex Healthcare goes live with imaging solution
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust has gone live with Sectra’s enterprise imaging solution to connect radiologists across large parts of south east England.
The trust became the sixth NHS organisation in the South East 2 Imaging Network to deploy Sectra’s solution when it was deployed in February 2025.
Trusts involved now share a single instance for radiology imaging, meaning that imaging such as x-rays, CT scans and MRIs are now instantaneously available to professionals across the six participating NHS trusts.
Tony Newman-Sanders, consultant radiologist and chief of cancer and diagnostics at Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “We are placing modern technology into the hands of our healthcare professionals, and creating the foundations on which we can build imaging services that meet the needs of our patients into the future.
“This has potential to deliver rapid impact for safer care, and to maximise the use of our specialist diagnostic expertise.”
The other five trusts in the network to implement the imaging network are Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust, and University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust.
The consortium of five trusts selected Sectra to deploy a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) in January 2022.
Improved access to critical diagnostic information captured at each organisation is intended to enable better-informed decision making at the point of care and deliver high quality diagnostic reporting.
It also lays the foundations for workforce development at a regional level, with new possibilities for harnessing scarce resource.
The deployment, which comes after a contract with Sectra in 2023, follows through work to consolidate imaging at the trust, evaluate the safe use of Sectra’s solution, and ensure that it is configured around trust workflows and the needs of healthcare professionals and patients.
Some trusts in the region have also deployed the digital pathology module of Sectra’s enterprise imaging solution.
Though this module was not part of the agreement at Surrey and Sussex, trust imaging specialists will still be able to benefit from visibility of pathology cases from elsewhere in the region, to complement their reporting.
Jane Rendall, UK and Ireland managing director at Sectra, said: “Hard work has gone into making sure that this deployment is successful.
“The potential for enhanced patient care that comes with it is highly significant at a time when diagnostics is so high on the national agenda.
“It has been gratifying to collaborate with teams at the trust, and across the region, in delivering against their objectives, and I look forward to ongoing collaboration as the future of diagnostics continues to evolve.”
