A supplier for the new machine had been found and the process put in train for building work to accommodate it in its planned site in the radiology department, Southern District Health Board specialist services director Patrick Ng told a board hospital advisory committee meeting yesterday.
The work would involve removing existing services from the new scanner site and some minor construction, he said.
The hospital’s existing scanners had serious technical issues in December which resulted in them being out of action for several days.
That and implementation issues with related new radiology information software had caused already increasing waiting lists to extend still further, Mr Ng said.
The software issues meant complete data on recent performance was unavailable, but numbers of scans were believed to be well below target.
"We will specify a pragmatic configuration which is focused on getting the machine in and into use as soon as we can."
In the meantime, the radiology service had recruited an additional medical imaging technologist and nursing staff required to run an evening CT scanning shift, and radiology sessions now started an hour earlier to allow an additional two scans a day.
"After 5pm is now a regular evening shift, Monday to Thursday, and we are getting an additional five elective scans completed each evening.
"This should put meaningful capacity into the system and should see our CT performance improve in the coming months."
The service had started a strategic review of its needs for the next five-10 years, work which would focus on CT and MRI scanning in Dunedin and ultrasonography in Dunedin and Southland,
"Our review will look at forecast growth in demand for all medical imaging modalities, the current age of our equipment and when it will need to be replaced, and what we can do to provide improved access."
