PACS Reporting Room/Desk Layout

Hi, We are looking at the design of our main PACS Reporting room. Is there any guidance/any documents/diagrams outline the recommended space for a PACS reporting workstation setup? There is nothing in our PACS supplier’s WES.

The particular issues we have as the room is now are that the benches are not deep enough, several of the “booths” are too small and we have problems with sound from one station carrying over to the others.

Anything we can use to guide Estates to a better design would be gratefully received.

Hi, I am following this with interest as we are considering changing from individual offices to a ‘reporting hub’.

The RCR has some useful publications but these are quite general and relate to either DSE requirements or the quality of screens/ viewing conditions.

Calibrated headsets may be better at distinguishing sound only from the wearer than a Speech Mike for example, but you should also look at acoustic barriers between workstations. Who is your PACS provider?

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We’ve had several iterations. We had a room with booths but users found it too claustrophobic so we ripped that out. We the tried a more open office with moveable partitions and found people tended to move them out the way so they could converse more easily.

Now we have a more open plan communal reporting with the desks round the edge. The desks can each take 4 monitors so are reasonable well spaced. I’ll aim to post a photo.

As well as the communal reporting we have offices with 1 or 2 workstations. These are better for teaching and checking as fewer distraction for others.

We recently created a Reporting Hub using 7 pods, each with its own dimmable lights, height adjustable desks and ergonomic chairs. Entry to the Hub is key card restricted to Reporting staff which reduces distractions. Generally, well received and now it is always full.

We also went on to do a smaller version for a Hot Reporting hub area with 2 pods and an open space. We also have few offices with 1 workstation and couple of 2-workstation communal rooms.

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Perhaps it is time for a Blast from the Past

Digital Eye for the Analog Guy - YouTube

A lot of this is old hat now, but there are still some fun things going on that might make you think.

For a more ‘modern’ approach, there has been some stuff coming out from the new AAPM reports as to how to set up the room and ‘dark as possible’ is prob not the way to go anymore. The lighting issue is one that is bound to go on for an age. I do think though that too much thought is spent looking at the ‘bright end’ of the systems, whereas making sure to optimise the dark parts of the image and ensuring those are easily readable is a better use of some of the newer displays (personal opinion, of course).

What has been interesting has been the recent articles where new ‘architectural design’ tools have been used. For example (and other tools do exist) there is this one
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2020.09.041

I do assume though that you will be like most of us and just have to fit in to a set space with less resources that you might have thought you would have. I do think that having some degree of separation for the ‘on duty’ radiologist when other clinicans come to call is very useful to reduce the distraction to the main reporting effort.

But that is just me I guess