Wait times for CT scans are expected to decrease with the addition of a brand new CT Scanner at the North Bay Regional Health Centre.
It is scheduled to go into operation on Monday.
“We are actually trying to increase maybe by 3,000 or 4,000 CT scans in the first year, which is about a 15 to 20 percent growth,“ said Steve Touliopoulos, manager of diagnostic imaging.
“And we’re more excited about having the capacity to handle future growth and future new technologies and procedures. In the past we were always kind of handcuffed, behind the eight ball and being very reactive. It takes a lot of hard work to try and make sure the right people are getting the right scans as quick as possible.”
The new addition means the hospital has two CT scanners, doubling its capability to meet the needs of the population.
“It is a 3-D rendering of the body. We can go head to toe with this and focus it on almost any part of the body. The benefits of the new technology is that we can do that with reduced radiation dose,” said radiologist Dr. Jeff Hodge.
It will also provide a level of screening not previously offered.
“We get great images, we can do multiple new things which is exciting such as vascular studies. With the new machine we’re actually able to increase our ability to screen our population such as screening for lung cancers and hopefully getting up and running with colon cancer screening which people weren’t able to access here in North Bay,” explained Dr. Hodge.
“So we can actually put a needle in someone’s body down to the millimetre and actually take a sample of that lung cancer or whatever it need be. We can do that safely, quickly and painlessly here in our department. Finding the cancer and biopsying the cancer are two of the things we can use this new technology for.”
The CT scanners won’t both be operating at their maximum capacity at all times.
“That’s not the goal of having a second machine. It is to increase capacity and increase the options to do screening testing and to reduce the wait time. It is not to run it at its maximum capacity.”
The cost installed, is a little over one million dollars.
“This was purchased by the community. We are very dependent on our generous donors in the community. We don’t know what we would do without them,” said Touliopoulos.
“That is just the fact of the way government has it set up. They do give us funding. It is limited but there actually is no funding for capital equipment.”
It will release some of the backlog, which Dr. Hodge described as ballooning.
“It was getting up well above the provincial average to the three of four months wait time. For a non-emergency scan, the province says it should be about a month long wait. This extra machine will help with that,” said Dr. Hodge.
Having a new top of the line machine is said to be a benefit when trying to attract people to work at the hospital explained Dr. Hodge.
“Whether that’s a radiologist like myself, or whether it is other specialists that know that we have the best technology. Having that available to them is exciting and it helps with our recruiting efforts here in the north.”
Its benefits are said to be many.
“Lower dose of radiation. It is a quicker machine that lets us acquire better images faster, and get them to us, the radiologists, quicker so we can get those results to the patients and their physicians as accurately and as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Jeff Hodge radiologist
The machine is capable of accommodating a person up to a maximum weight of 660 pounds.
Hodge says there is actually a cost saving with having two machines. Should one go down, there is a backup, allowing for scheduling of downtime during the day to avoid paying overtime for CT mechanics, decreasing the level and cost of the upkeep.
“About a month ago when that wind storm came through town, it knocked the fuse out of our machine and we were down for about 7 or 8 hours that night. We had no CT machine and people were threatened with having to go to other facilities, so to have a backup machine is very beneficial for emergency situations,” said Dr. Hodge.
The machines are on a 7 or 8-year lifecycle. The machine that this is replacing was at the hospital for over a decade.
On an average day, 50 people use the CT scanner.
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