THE image intensifier that the Gazette is campaigning for will be a great boon to Malvern Community Hospital, says the consultant who will be using it.

Dr Mahesh Chaudhari will be in charge of the pain clinic set to start up at the hospital shortly and which will treat people suffering with conditions such as neck pain, back pain and sciatica pains.

“It will be run by a multi-disciplinary team consisting of myself, a specialist nurse and a orthopaedic practitioner,” he said.

Diagnosis is one thing, but treatment is another, and for this, the C-arm image intensifier is a vital tool for making the treatments accurate, said Dr Chaudhari.

“We treat many of these conditions with injections, and the injections have to be placed with great accuracy to ensure that they are as effective as possible,” he said.

“This is where the image intensifier is so valuable, because it enables us to make the injections very precise.

“I would say that we make 80 per cent of our injections using the image intensifier.

“Once we can do that in Malvern, it means that patients from Malvern, many of them elderly and in pain, would not have to travel long distances to other hospitals to get their treatment.

“It will be very good for local people and we are really grateful that this campaign to buy it has been launched.”

Alex Borg, general manager of anaesthesia at Worcestershire Acute NHS Trust, said: “I want to thank the Friends and the Malvern Gazette for this campaign.

“Installing the image intensifier at Malvern Community Hospital will make a great deal of difference to patients from the town and the surrounding area.”