CT scanner: Second radiologist to be hired. Standing in the small, tired yellow waiting room attached to the emergency department at Shuswap Lake General Hospital, it’s hard to imagine that within some 18 months, the space will be home to state-of-the-art emergency and imaging departments. Health Minister George Abbott, Interior Health Authority chair Norm Embree and North Okanagan Columbia Shuswap Regional Hospital District rep Rhona Martin were taken on a tour of the hospital’s newly renovated and soon-to-be-built areas on Friday. ER, which serves some 20,000 patients in a year, will not only be a more modern department, it will be a more private facility with 10 beds as well as a separate triage room, a special pediatrics area and a psychiatric secure room. And people being brought in on stretchers will no longer be on view to those in the waiting room, as a separate ambulance entrance will provide privacy. As well, thanks to an updated facility and new diagnostic equipment, ER staff will be able to do more than just stabilize and ship some trauma patients to facilities that offer a higher level of care.A tour of the windowless lab revealed closer quarters that staff previously had in their old spot between ER and imaging. There were complaints about noise levels and air temperature, but Shuswap-Revelstoke administrator Kirstine Hill assured the start-up “bugs” were being worked out.
Down the hall and into the former laundry space, pharmacy workers are delighted with their new home, which sports skylights and safe areas for chemo and sterile preparations, among other things. Not only does this new pharmacy serve the hospital but long-term care facilities, the eye-care centre in Armstrong and hospitals in Merritt, Ashcroft, Clearwater and Revelstoke. The need for space becomes evident as the tour group moves into the imaging department, an area much in need of renewal that still manages to serve some 38,000 people per year. A place where acting manager Kim Mead explains half the people on a waiting list for a CT scan in Vernon are actually from Salmon Arm and bookings for general radiology in Salmon Arm are about one week instead of a day or two. Looking ahead, a very excited radiologist, John Wickert, has a catalogue open to a new, state-of-the-art, 64-slice CT scanner. “As it stands today, we’re approved, the probability is very high,” the radiologist said Monday. “This scanner we’re looking at is top of the line, one of the best, if not the best, and the same one Vernon has.”
Wickert says having the sophisticated equipment will mean decreased travel for diagnostic studies and better, more immediate treatment for local residents. For example, he notes, in the past, anyone suffering a stroke had to go to Vernon for a CT scan, thereby losing the window of opportunity to get medication that can reduce the damage caused by a stroke. As well, the detail provided by the 64-slice, will reveal things like leg fractures and stomach trauma in sufficient detail for doctors to decide whether a patient can be treated here or needs to be sent for a higher level of care. Wickert, has headed up radiology for 12 years on his own and is delighted a second radiologist has agreed to join the department when the new CT scanner is in operation. “The other thing that is happening with the new building is we are being provided for a third X-ray and ultrasound, so we can do more procedures which we haven’t been able to do in the past,” he says, noting the third X-ray room has always been his priority over the CT scan. “We have been approved but only as a class C approval, which means we won’t get them.” Wickert’s cynical judgment on this is born of experience. “The third X-ray room has been approved to be installed three times, but every time it has been ripped from under our feet,” he says with a trace of anger. “ The excuse is usually lack of space.” Now that there will be space to accommodate the third room, Wickert says it looks like funding is going to become the issue. “This has gone through the Diagnostic Imaging committee and gone to the top. We’ve actually had architects in to look at the space and then we turn around and it’s gone,” he says. “The second general ultrasound room has also been approved, but again it’s so far down the list it won’t ever happen.” Wickert notes the federal government has once again failed to send funding for capital equipment so rather than buying new items, health authorities are replacing those that break down. It annoys him that while other communities get new equipment, Salmon Arm has acquired the money to buy the C-arm and the new CT scanner through community fundraising.“We did get two X-ray rooms over the past 12 months, but only because they broke down,” he says. “They were emergency replacements.”Wickert says Salmon Arm did 25,774 X-rays with two rooms last year, 7,000 more than Williams Lake, and 9,000 more than Cranbrook and Trail, all of which have three rooms. “We’re doing 50 per cent more than they do on two thirds of the equipment. There’s no question I’ve got the best staff. I get locums coming here and half of them want to stay because the staff is so good.”
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