Mobile X-rays — carried out at home while you're in a favourite armchair

The HSE’s mobile X-ray service is now available in every county. Two families describe how it helped them save time and avoid the stress of attending hospital

Joan Doyle and her mum Margaret Doyle from Kilkenny. Photography: Patrick Browne

Last October Margaret Doyle, 93, sat in her favourite armchair in her living room and had a chest X-ray while looking out at the familiar view of her backyard.

“For me it was wonderful,” she says. “I’d been dreading having to go into hospital and sit in a cold corridor for God knows how long waiting for an X-ray.”

Margaret’s home X-ray, carried out within three hours of being ordered by her GP, came courtesy of the HSE’s community-based mobile X-ray service, which helps older patients avoid hospital emergency departments. Operating on a pilot basis since 2022, the service has been available in every county since March 1, 2024 for older patients in nursing homes, community facilities, and in their own homes.

With all types of X-ray available — including chest, hip/pelvis, knee, wrist, and shoulder — Kilkenny-based GP Dr Frank Chambers says the service captures a broad spectrum of ailments. “I started using it in mid-2023 and I’ve used it for 30 patients aged 75 and upwards. It’s another investigation point that helps us keep patients in the community. Post-covid, a lot of older people don’t want to go to hospital.

“And it can be hard to mobilise these patients as their fragility evolves, [making it] a major challenge to bring them to a primary care centre or to hospital.”

Margaret’s daughter Joan encountered exactly this challenge. “It’s a two-person job for me to get Mam to hospital. If I go park the car, she’s not able to walk from the car park to the hospital. And I can’t drop her at the door and leave her because she frets and I just wouldn’t do it. It’s doable, but I’d have to organise a second person to go with me.”

Aside from patients not needing a medical card to avail of the free HSE-funded service, Dr Chambers loves how fast and efficient it is. “I can order an X-ray for a patient on an encrypted e-referral system set up by the HSE, and I can get it done on the same day. The radiographer will attend the patient in their home or nursing home, and I can get the results within hours.”

Dr Frank Chambers GP

Dr Chambers, whose 12-GP practice orders about one mobile X-ray weekly, says: “Without leaving their home environment, it gives patients and their carers confidence and a safety net that they don’t have pneumonia or a deeper problem going on. If there has been a fall it’s great to know there’s no fracture.”

Last August both Mary Frances Robinson and her 89-year-old dad, Bob Williams, were “in no fit state” for him to attend hospital for a chest X-ray. “I wasn’t mentally ready to go into a hospital, nor was my dad. We’d buried my mam just five days earlier — she’d been in hospital for a month.”

When Bob’s GP said a portable X-ray could be done at home, Mary Frances was stunned.

“I can’t describe the relief, knowing this could be done. In the previous week, Dad had begun to deteriorate with coughing. He was very prone to chest infections and now he was very tired and lethargic. He was on antibiotics but I felt he wasn’t responding.

“I said to my dad, ‘You won’t believe this, but a portable X-ray is coming out to the house’. He took it in his stride whereas I was in awe. And so relieved that this would give us — at home — a complete picture of what was going on with my dad, if the antibiotics were working, if it was pneumonia.

Within 35 minutes of the refrigerator-shaped X-ray unit arriving at the house, the X-ray was done in the hallway of their Kilkenny home. “There was no A&E, no waiting around, and no multiple people where Dad would be susceptible to other infections. We were in our own home, and afterwards, Dad was able to waddle back to bed, relax, and have tea and a biscuit.

“And the X-ray showed he had an infection but was responding to antibiotics, so he didn’t need to go to hospital.”

The late Bob and Ann Williams with daughter Mary Frances Robinson

Bob Williams passed away a month later. “He died of heart failure but I think he died of a broken heart. He adored my mam, they were very much in sync with one another,” says Mary Frances, who will always be grateful that on that August day her dad was spared so much.

HSE operational performance and integration division national director Joe Ryan confirms that over 9,000 patient examinations have been carried out for residents in nursing homes and community facilities as part of the mobile X-ray service up to the end of March 2024.

“For the vast majority of these patients — 94% — a diagnosis was provided that prevented a transfer to hospital,” says Ryan, adding that the average age of people using the service is 83.

Joe Ryan of HSE

During March, the first month of its national rollout, 638 patients were visited in nursing homes, community care facilities and private houses. In 614 of these cases, a hospital transfer was avoided — saving on 1,228 ambulance journeys to hospitals because the mobile X-ray service came to the patient.

“The radiographer arrives on-site, an X-ray examination takes place in the [patient’s] own room and a report is shared with the referring doctor within four hours.

“Therefore, older patients are getting the right care, in the right place, at the right time,” says Ryan.