Park Medical Centre does not accept requests for the prescription of sedative medication for use in investigative procedures and travel. In this approach we our adhering to our duty of care to provide safe, consistent, and appropriate care for our patients.

Safe and effective analgesia and sedation should be delivered by an appropriately trained and credentialed team with good access to anaesthetics, pre-procedure assessment, sedation plan and checklist, with appropriate monitoring and availability of resuscitation equipment and reversal agents.

Benzodiazepines such as Diazepam, at any dose, have the potential to cause over sedation. Conversely, such medications can also have an idiosyncratic response in patients, and even very small doses can cause increased agitation in some subsets of patients.

Sedated patients need to be regularly monitored. There have been cases of respiratory arrest in scanners and on aeroplanes.

We have therefore agreed as a practice not to prescribe benzodiazepines in these circumstances.

If your consultant at the hospital has requested the scan, you need to discuss the options with them.