THE Friends of the Royal Hampshire County Hospital is holding a High Street collection on Saturday March 18, to help reach its target of £20,000 towards an ultrasound scanner.

The machine will be used in supporting pain relief for breast surgery and general obstetrics in Winchester.

The independent Friends charity has underwritten the cost of this state of the art equipment.

Consultants Dr Arun Venkataraju and Dr Jonathan Anns said: “We bid for this equipment, as we were keen to expand the pain relief techniques that we are able to offer to our patients in breast surgery, pregnant patients in labour and also for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in our ever-expanding critical care services.

"We also wish to make Winchester a centre of excellence for training in pain relief techniques and to initiate new research projects.

"In breast surgery, we have started to use this ultrasound to provide novel pain relief blocks and our patients have started to see its benefits. We would like more staff to be able to perform these local anaesthetic blocks using the ultrasound and we organise regular training sessions to achieve this goal. We have already used this equipment to help site epidural catheters in challenging and complex patients on numerous occasions. We have had situations where providing labour epidurals would have been almost impossible, but were made relatively easy because of this ultrasound machine."

We use the scanner routinely in intensive care to perform procedures, diagnose conditions and we can only say that the benefits are almost instant.

The anaesthetic department at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital already has a reputation amongst trainees for its excellence in regional anaesthetic training. The new ultrasound machine has only added to that reputation, as it now enables us to offer more and better training opportunities to our trainees. The latest report and survey on the quality of training has been highly positive and we are in no doubt that our regional anaesthetic training opportunities has been one of the contributors to this excellent feedback, as it has been singled out for praise in the reports.

In addition to its intended areas of use, we also use the scanner regularly in Orthopaedic surgery to offer pain blocks and in locating the correct site for spinal anaesthesia. In fact, we have been able to successfully perform spinal anaesthesia in patients who had previous failed attempts.

In summary, our patients benefit on a daily basis and our profile as a training Hospital has only benefitted from having this machine. But this is only the beginning. As the number of staff who become trained in using it increases, we will be able to expand our services and cover more and more patients. We are also looking to initiate research projects, which will further enhance our reputation, not just locally, but on a national level.”

The Friends has set up a MyDonate facility:https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/florenceportalhouse