Boston Pilgrim Hospital and Lincoln County Hospital are able to offer a ‘bigger variety’ of procedures as a result
Oliver Castle – Local Democracy Reporter
06:00, 22 Aug 2026
The equipment at Boston Pilgrim Hospital(Image: ULTH)
Specialist technology is enabling patients to receive complex care more quickly, health chiefs have said.
Mark Dorn, radiology operations manager at the United Lincolnshire Teaching Hospitals (ULTH) said that specialist radiology equipment at Boston Pilgrim Hospital and Lincoln County Hospital is helping to reduce waiting times and is freeing up time for officials to spend on other healthcare issues.
Mr Dorn said: “We can offer a bigger variety of procedures. The clinical businesses that we support do not send patients to wait at tertiary centres like Leicester or Nottingham when we can provide them here in Lincolnshire.”
Mr Dorn told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the Alphenix Core plus system was put in at Pilgrim Hospital in Boston last summer, while the Alphenix Sky plus system was established at Lincoln County Hospital in early 2022.
He explained that it has allowed the ULTH to offer more specialist treatments at its hospitals in Lincoln and Boston.
Mr Dorn added: “We have increased our offering of procedures that we can support the other business units with, with regard to embolisations and meeting vascular targets that are required nationally.
“If we can do an intervention sooner then it stops the patients potentially having a more complex operation which is more invasive.”
Mr Dorn explained that the HD (High Definition) detector technology magnifies an area of a patient which a health official wants to look at and improves the amount of detail which is visible, helping to speed up the process and means it is completed more quickly.
The technology is mainly used to help address complex conditions including kidney and high-risk cardiovascular conditions, along with other complex health needs.
He went on to explain that this new technology is particularly helpful in Lincolnshire where public transport isn’t always very reliable.
Mr Dorn said: “It means that less patients go onto lists at other centres, therefore they’ll be seen quicker and there’s no pressure on the patients to travel as far.
“The transport links aren’t as good as they could be. We’re a very wide and dispersed county.”
He said that because of the ‘healthcare environment and the economics of it’, the ULTH doesn’t have plans to expand this service to other hospitals in the county such as Grantham.
But Mr Dorn said health bosses are working to provide more healthcare closer to home where possible.
He added: “As part of the diagnostics team, we try to offer as much as we can to our patients and as close as we can within the limits of the geography of the county.
“I’m not going to say future-proof but the machines that we can offer are quite a wide range of procedures if the clinicians would like to refer to them.
“All the patients belong to the other medical teams and they refer to us for these procedures.”