The series of meetings were held over three nights, in Cromwell, Alexandra and Wanaka, by Central Otago Health Services Ltd (COHSL), to gauge the support for its case for a Dunstan-based scanner.
"It's a busy time of year and that's a good number of people voicing their support. That's overwhelmingly the mandate we needed to take our proposals to the next step, " health company chairman Russell McGeorge, of Wanaka, said.
There was also a groundswell of support from several other community organisations within the area served by Dunstan, he said.
The issue of where a CT scanner should be sited to serve the wider Central Otago Queenstown Lakes area has become a contentious one, with a National Health Board panel recommending it should be based at Lakes District Hospital at Frankton. Dunstan has been lobbying for one for several years.
This week the Southern District Health Board agreed to set up a panel to review where the scanner should be sited.
Mr McGeorge said COHSL's next step was to complete the business case for the equipment and make a formal submission to the district health board, now that it had the backing of the community.
"This is not a call to arms, it's not a call to march against Queenstown-Lakes or the Wakatipu," he told the public meetings this week.
The way the issue had arisen was "divisive" but actually the two hospitals wanted to work more closely together.
COHSL director Dr Graeme Ballantyne, of Lake Hawea, told the meetings that emergency CT scans were only 20% of the total scans done.
The national health panel had said the emergency use was one of the reasons why the scanner should be sited at Lakes District Hospital "but we feel that's not a good justification when 80% of its work is non-urgent scans", Dr Ballantyne said.
About 150 people attended the Wanaka meeting and Mr McGeorge said they confirmed Dunstan was seen as their "local" hospital.
Dunstan's business case was presented by the health company's deputy chairwoman, Brenda Wills, of Chatto Creek.
The "unknown" in the figures was, if Dunstan had a CT scanner, how much the district health board would pay it to do scans, "and that's obviously a crucial issue", she said.
Sources of funding included charitable trusts and revenue streams included district health board funding for public scans, revenue from ACC and revenue from user-pays private scans, she said.
Dunstan Hospital is community-owned, so that gave it some scope to do private scans.
Dunstan's general manager Karyn Penno , of Cromwell, read a statement from Dunstan and Lakes District Hospitals' medical staff. They were working together more often and planned to meet regularly to improve services, they said.
They were keen to minimise parochial influences and continue to develop two strong rural hospitals working in a co-operative and complementary way.
