Speaking at yesterday's Otago District Health Board meeting, board member Mr Thomson said Waitaki District Health Services had rejected an offer to do the publicly-funded scans, ordered by doctors at Dunedin Hospital, in Oamaru, at no cost to Waitaki.
"I think it is scandalous that offer was not accepted.
"To see it continue to be misrepresent-ed as our refusal to allow Oamaru people to be scanned in that area is such a distortion of facts."
When contacted, Waitaki chairman George Berry denied the organisation wanted to make a profit and said he "totally disagreed" with Mr Thomson's comments.
"We put a proposal up which will allow us to recover our costs. We differ from his view of what those costs are."
The issue should be left to board management to sort out, Mr Berry said.
"We have struck nothing but negativity over this issue and it is just so silly."
About two people per week travel to Dunedin to have a scan that could have been done on the scanning machine at Oamaru Hospital.
Some scans would still have to be done in Dunedin, such as if a patient was having other procedures done, or a specialist had to be present during the scan.
Speaking after the meeting, Mr Thomson said when the CT scanner was installed at Oamaru Hospital last year, the board had made it clear it could not afford to run two scanners and there was no financial benefit to Otago to have another machine in Oamaru.
The costs of doing a scan included the cost of purchasing the machine, staffing costs, the material costs of doing each scan and the cost of having a radiologist read it.
As the scanner had been essentially donated by the community, there were no purchase costs and staffing costs were fixed as staff were already in place and no additional staff would be needed to do the about two scans a week, Mr Thomson said.
The board had offered to reimburse the material costs of doing the scan and the board's own radiologists would read the scans free of charge.
He believed it should be "unacceptable to the people of Waitaki" that offer had been rejected, Mr Thomson said.
"I am sure when the community donated it [the scanner], it was not envisaged it would only be used for those that could afford to pay for it."
Mr Berry said about 700 scans were done yearly at Oamaru Hospital, not including private scans.
"Scanning is an essential diagnostic tool in modern medicine and ideally every hospital would have a scanner.
"It is not as if the scanner is sitting idle. It is working hard for the people of Waitaki district."
The scanner was installed as part of a $1.8 million radiology department upgrade.
