Professional Evaluation of Emergency Radiology Service Response Times at Tertiary Hospitals in Lagos State

Emergency radiology service response time, encompassing the interval from imaging request to completed examination and from examination completion to report availability, directly determines the timeliness of clinical decision-making in life-threatening conditions including stroke, trauma, and acute abdomen. At tertiary hospitals in Lagos State, South West Nigeria, the current emergency radiology response performance and its determinants require professional evaluation. This study professionally evaluates emergency radiology service response times at Lagos University Teaching Hospital and Lagos Island General Hospital. A prospective time audit is conducted over an eight-week period, documenting request-to-scan time and scan-to-report time for 400 emergency radiological examinations across CT brain, CT chest, abdominal ultrasound, and chest radiography categories. Contributing factors to delays including staff availability, equipment readiness, patient transfer time, and reporting queue length are concurrently recorded. Descriptive statistics and multiple regression identifying determinants of delayed response are computed in SPSS. Available emergency radiology literature from South West Nigeria identifies CT scanner capacity constraints and out-of-hours radiologist availability as the primary determinants of emergency radiology response time, with mean CT-to-report times exceeding six hours for overnight examinations. The ACR Radiology Response Time Standards and RCR Clinical Radiology standards provide the professional benchmarks. Findings are expected to reveal significant out-of-hours response time deterioration. Recommendations address a formal emergency radiology on-call radiologist protocol, radiographer CT workforce overnight staffing, and real-time reporting turnaround monitoring at both Lagos State tertiary institutions. Keywords: emergency radiology, response times, tertiary hospitals, Lagos State, South West Nigeria.