Hospital records - number of scans recorded during radiotherapy.

Hello Rod (Osca2023) 

I asked. So the first rotation of the RT machine once you are on the sunbed is a "positioning scan" to make sure the right "bits" are being zapped - if you are not spot on you may feel the table adjusting to get you right. The second 2 rotations are the cancer cells being "zapped".

I didn't ask if they kept the scan each day - I hope this helps.

Best wishes - Brian.

Thanks Brian (Millibob )

I began by asking my hospital trust for my records way back before Christmas, very much out of interest than anything else.

They went through the correct procedure to ensure that I was who I said I was and eventually supplied paper copies of much of the data and then gave me a password secured link to a server to enable me to download the digitised ones. They also sent me software to read the files that were scans. However when I looked closely there were no scans from my RT procedures, this they readily admitted was an error but the RT department didn't know how to supply them to me! Eventually after some prompting I collected a secure USB drive from the hospital containing what I assumed was my RT scans.
Having had computer problems it was a few days before I was able to look at the files contained on the USB drive only to discover that there were individual files (slices) of just one scan but that did not contain any data showing my identity or the date that they were created, i.e. they could have been any male member of the population (you can tell male from female).

Again the hospital have apologised for this error and are looking into it. But I would have thought there should be more than this one scan which I can possibly guess is from the planning CT scan.

Who knows the saga continues, but it doesn't engender ones trust in the capabilities of the hospital!

Rod

I am not sure they would necessarily keep all 20 scans as once they have been used for that particular day they would not be needed again?  If you imagine all the daily scans for everyone having radiotherapy being kept that's a lot - though I am sure it can be done I do wonder whether or not it is done?  The most important would be the planning scan and possibly the very last scan?

Thanks freefaller  those are similar to my thoughts however I don't know where the GDPR rules come into play with this.
It seems that I am the first patient to have ever asked for copies of scans from the present RT department and they haven't a clue how to handle such a request.

The thing that concerns me a little is that what they have sent has no identity or creation date so could be anyone's scan. If I tell you that I live in Shropshire you can easily calculate which trust it is and will know from news reports of the past few months that they don't have a very good reputation.

Rod

Well I dread to think what would happen if I asked for mine.  It was OK asking at one hospital where everything was done but when I went for a private consultation before deciding on my HT ad RT for PCa back in 2015/16 I found that the Biopsy material was kept in one hospital, the actual records were kept at another and scans at another - only one of those hospitals was actually in my health board but none of the tests or scans had been done there and none of the hospitals was the one I would have been sent to for any treatment!  Took lots of phone calls and letters to get all the stuff together.  Then when I went for a private consultation for a heart problem over 6 months after completing HT and RT I got records together and the PCa didn't even appear on there!  You couldn't make it up could you?