Beyond Blocks Kingston Hospital MRI

Description

In February 2022, The LEGO Foundation announced that it was donating 600 LEGO MRI Scanners to hospitals worldwide to help children cope with the uncertainty of having a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan.

“MRI Scanners are huge machines. They also make a lot of noise which can be very daunting for children. Our team have found that use of models such as the LEGO model has led to more positive, calm experiences for many children. This benefits the child, their family and also the quality of the MRI scan, which relies on the person being very still for up to an hour to work.”

As part of what Beyond Blocks does to give back to the community, I regularly donate free LEGO Robotics sessions as a volunteer in my local hospital in Kingston-upon-Thames, going on to the children’s ward and bringing my LEGO kits.

I got talking to the wonderful staff on the Play team and asked if they had heard about the MRI project. They had, but were not one of the lucky few hospitals that were picked to receive one.

However, that didn’t stop them, and the tea, believing that LEGO MRI models would be a really effective tool for them, decided to build their own from parts they already had to hand.

The result was a perfectly usable LEGO MRI, which the team uses all the time with the children.

The team were really proud of the model and rightly so as it achieved what they needed it to do and they wanted to share it with other children’s wards who may be able to make use of it.

I wanted to help, so I created the instructions for the team using Stud.io and here they are for you to download for free.

To make it easier for you to build, you can get all the parts for this model from our friends at Pocket Money Bricks, who have put together all the parts in one pocket friendly package, so you can just click to purchase. Just pop over to their store at https://pmb-store.sumupstore.com/product/beyond-blocks-mri-kit to buy