While Riverside Health Care Facilities, Inc. can’t yet give a firm date as to when the new CT scanner at La Verendrye Hospital here will be operational, they want district residents to know they’re busy making preparations to get in on line as soon as possible.
During a site visit Friday, Patti Johnson, manager of diagnostic services for Riverside, told the Times that since the Toshiba Aquilion 64-slice CT scanner was ordered back in late January, work has been ongoing to prepare the room to house the scanner as well as an adjoining control/observation room from which staff will operate it.
“The machine will arrive when the room is ready,” Johnson explained. “Whenever the room is ready, we have to let [the supplier] know and they’ll be bringing us the CT scanner.
“We have no room for it to arrive and just sit somewhere,” she noted. “When the room’s ready, it will be installed.
“We would like to have it operational very soon. It’s not going to be tomorrow, but the work has started,” added Johnson, saying the installation of the CT scanner only will take a few days once it’s here.
During Phase IV renovations at La Verendrye back in 2006, some space in the diagnostic imaging department was left unfinished in anticipation of the hospital getting a CT scanner.
That space has since been torn up and preparations have been ongoing.
“The walls were put up for aesthetics [at the time of the renovations],” said Johnson. “Now the wiring has to go in; there’s electrical requirements specific to the Toshiba 64-slice.
“There’s air-conditioning requirements,” she added. “[The CT scanner] generates a lot of heat and there needs to be special air-conditioning and venting.”
Johnson also said lead has been ordered to install in the walls to provide shielding. This is a requirement for all of the X-ray rooms in the hospital.
The scanning room will be sealed off and self-contained. In fact, technologists will operate the CT scanner from a separate control room—shielded from the radiation.
Once the scanner is installed, Toshiba will come in and work with Riverside staff to run it through an accreditation process and make sure it’s functioning properly before it’s used on patients.
Johnson said diagnostic imaging department staff already have undergone some training in anticipation of the CT scanner’s arrival, but will learn even more closer to the date the equipment is installed and operational.
CT (or computed tomography) is a medical imaging method in which digital geometry processing is used to generate a three-dimensional image of the inside of an object from a large series of two-dimensional X-ray images taken around a single axis of rotation.
This will be used as a more precise X-ray to takes images of everything from complex fractures, cysts, and tumours to aneurysms and blood clots, to name just a few types of diagnoses.
Johnson stressed hospital staff are “very excited” about the much-needed piece of equipment.
“We’re waiting anxiously for it to be put into place,” she remarked. “We know the needs of the community, we know everybody’s anxiously waiting for it, and we just want it to get up and running.”
“The staff are excited. It’s something new, it’s something else we can provide. It’s a very needed modality,” added Johnson.
“The community acted very quickly [raising funds for it]. We would like to have acted as quickly putting it in, but these things take time,” she noted.
As previously reported, the CT scanner is made possible through the “Just Imagine” campaign—a fundraising drive held in 2006-07 during which district residents pledged more than $1.5 million in the course of six months.
While Riverside initially had hoped to have it up and running by the end of December, it did not receive formal approval for the CT scanner from the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care until last fall.
Riverside then put out a request for proposals for a 64-slice CT scanner, with the Toshiba model being ordered in late January.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
