CT head reporting by radiographers: Findings of an accredited postgraduate programme

Content of Presentation:
Reporting by radiographers is now widely adopted into the service delivery of English NHS trusts. CT Head reporting courses have been running since the early 2000’s, and has been running at Canterbury Christ Church University since 2007.
Relevance:
To analyse the objective structured examination (OSE) results of the last four cohorts of radiographers (n=24) who successfully completed the postgraduate training.
Outcomes:
Using OSE scores of Agreement, Sensitivity and Specificity and using Kappa agreement of scores for comparison to 3 groups of consultant radiologists who produced the initial OSE reports. The cases contained a prevalence of 50% abnormal cases and 50% normal cases.
Discussion:
At the end of this study of training, radiographers appear to achieve high standards of CT head reporting.
The findings for this study suggest that the agreement rates for appropriately educated and trained radiographers is likely to be similar to consultant radiologists, although further work is on-going to investigate this, and confirm the clinical application of these initial encouraging findings that support the radiographers contribution to this aspect of the reporting service.