The Prince Rupert Regional Hospital needs a new CT Scanner now that its current one has broken down, and is too expensive to bother repairing. Patients in need of a CT Scan now have to use the nearest functioning machine, which is in Terrace.
It’s not known how long the hospital will be without its own scanner, the hospital has only just started sorting out the “logistics” of acquiring a new one that could cost anywhere between $350,000 to $1-million.
“We just hate not having this service, but it’s going to take a bit of leg work and brainstorming to figure out how to put in a new one in a timely fashion. It’s not something that we’re going to be able to turnaround in a week,” says the hospital’s manager of Medical Imaging, Loretta Robinson.
According to Robinson there were mechanical failures in the tech station and the scanner’s main CPU and both of these things need to be replaced. The cost of making those repairs on a machine that is over eight years old wasn’t worth it, so the hospital has decided it would make more sense to simply replace the machine entirely.