WRHA Investing $340m In Digital X-Ray Units

Six state- of- the- art digital X-ray units valued at $340 million, are currently being installed at hospitals by the Western Regional Health Authority (WRHA).

The new units are being placed at the Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) in St. James, (two units); Falmouth Public General Hospital in Trelawny (two units); Savanna-la-mar Public General Hospital in Westmoreland (one unit) and the Noel Holmes Hospital in Hanover (one unit).

In an interview with JIS News, Clinical Coordinator at CRH, Dr. Delroy Fray welcomed the acquisitions, noting that they will vastly improve the delivery of service at the facility.

“We are working towards zero downtime in terms of these services, so we are one step ahead. For some time, we have been having some problems, we have had breakdowns, and so forth. We are aiming to minimize all the outsourcing that we have been doing,” Dr. Fray said.

He informed that the new machines will be in place in the next two to three weeks, and that a 160 slice CT (computed tomography) machine will also be installed at the facility.

For his part, Manager of Radiology at CRH, Stewart Lawrence, outlined that the X-ray machines will be “the highest specification of machines you can get.”

“They are not the first of their kind, but this is the first area where we are putting in two at the same time and doing a mammography imaging suite with a mammogram machine, and we will be doing biopsies there. [We] also plan to commission a CT machine very soon,” he said.

“We will be moving away from the outsourcing; we are hoping to have everything done here. So, we don’t want to give patients any far appointments, which is a thing of the past. We want patients to come in and get through in reasonable time, so they can go back to their clinics and get their diagnosis, so we have better patient management,” Mr. Lawrence stated.

The manager also outlined that the machines would come with service contracts to ensure that they are properly serviced and maintained.

“I will be following up and ensuring that everything works to the best that they can. We will ensure that one person is in charge of each machine. They should do all the scheduled servicing, follow up everything on the machine, all the error logs will be reported on, so we will keep a good audit trail of each machine to ensure that the government’s money is well spent,” Mr. Lawrence assured.