Published on 02 July 2025
Benenden Hospital, the leading independent hospital based near Cranbrook, is pleased to announce the opening of its newly refurbished MRI suite complete with a £1m state-of-the-art MRI scanner.
To celebrate the new installation, an official ribbon cutting ceremony took place on Tuesday 1 July, bringing together the hospital’s Imaging team, community partners, the project management team and hospital leadership. The ribbon was cut by world champion record-holding GB Masters athletes Mensah Elliott and Joe Appiah, both former Benenden Hospital diagnostic patients.
The new MRI scanner, a Siemens Healthineers MAGNETOM Altea, is part of the hospital’s £1.4m upgrade programme to its Imaging department, supporting its culture of continuous improvement and innovation. The scanner offers increased image quality and faster scan times, increasing capacity and allowing the hospital’s Imaging team to identify health issues quickly and effectively.
The refurbished MRI suite contains a picture wall with landscape photography of the local Wealden countryside, helping patients relax, whilst the scanner has a wider bore – the patient chamber – for improved comfort.
The new scanner will allow the hospital to offer in excess of 6,000 MRI appointments per year.
Hospital Director Claire Harley said: “This significant investment underscores our hospital’s ongoing commitment to delivering high-quality, advanced diagnostic care to patients in the South East and beyond.
"I'd like to thank everyone involved in delivering the project, from our fabulous Imaging team to all in the project management team, including Siemens Healthineers and our building contractor CFES, who ensured the installation went so smoothly.
"Alongside our other services such as our comprehensive liver scanning ultrasound, this new MRI scanner expands our imaging capabilities to ensure our patients benefit from the most advanced equipment available."
Installing our new MRI scanner
Imaging Manager, Emma Masters, talks through the journey of installing our new MRI scanner.
Hi, I'm Emma. I'm the Imaging Manager at Benenden Hospital. On average, we perform almost 6,000 MRI scans per year. And we want to ensure that we are able to work in line with best practice and evolving technologies in the medical imaging field.
That is why we have invested in our new Siemens Altea 1.5 Tesla MRI scanner. It comes with AI technology to improve image quality, reduce scan times, and provide you with a first class MRI experience.
Building works commenced in March of this year, including the removal of our old MRI scanner and preparation of the area for the installation. We continued to provide a first class MRI service using a mobile machine, which was staffed by our brilliant Imaging team.
Our new scanner arrived on the 19th of May and then work commenced on installing and commissioning the scanner in preparation for our patients. Our new Siemens MRI scanner brings a whole host of benefits to patient care, namely improved image quality and hence timely diagnosis.
Alongside this, the patient experience is much improved with the ambient lighting, local landscape bringing the outside in and ceiling tiles adding another dimension when patients are scanned feet first.
Imaging Manager Emma Masters added: "As an imaging department, we feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to be a part of this MRI replacement project and introduce exciting new technology at the forefront of medical imaging.
"The team are excited to work with our new Siemens MRI scanner, as we develop our protocols to decrease our scanning times, whilst capturing extremely high-quality diagnostic images. The introduction of our new scanner has afforded us opportunities to improve the patient experience, and we are lucky enough to have introduced ambient lighting within the scan room and comforting imagery to aid the patient experience.
"We are all extremely proud of this project and hope that our patients enjoy their scanning experience."