Cancer scanner could soon be ‘out of date’

A PET-CT scanner similar to that which lies idle at Cork University Hospital

A Cork Fine Gael TD has branded it “a scandal” that HSE South has spend at least €1m of public money sending cancer patients to Dublin for scans, while a multi-million euro scanner lies idle in Cork three years after it was purchased.

And now Deputy David Stanton fears that the Positron Emission Tomography (PET)-CT scanner at Cork University Hospital, purchased for €3.8m in 2009, could become obsolete if its operation is delayed for much longer.

“I have no reason to believe that this machine is not ready and waiting to go,” Deputy Stanton said. “It’s a scandal, and it could well be that if it’s left idle for much longer, it will be out of date.”

Deputy Stanton is waiting for a response to a Dáil question he submitted this week for Health Minister James Reilly; yet another query regarding the scanning unit’s anticipated start date, which has been referred to the HSE.

The Cork East TD says that in the absence of information he can only speculate on why the PET-CT scanner—one of just two in the country’s public health system, with the other operational at St James’s Hospital in Dublin—is not running in Cork.

With the cutting-edge scanner purchased in 2009 for €3.8m, it was in November 2010 that the HSE was authorised to breach the recuitment embargo and appoint a clinical specialist radiographer, two senior radiographers and a principal physicist to run the equipment.

By March 2011, these posted were unfilled, and it is believed that against the backdrop of rising costs from sending hundreds of cancer patients from this area every year to St James’s in Dublin for PET-CT scans, the HSE is currently tendering for private agency workers.

According to HSE figures, HSE South shelled out a sum in excess of €1m between 2008 and September 2010 on cancer scans at St James's, Dublin, for hundreds patients in this area, who must arrange for their own transport to the capital. Expenditure figures subsequent to that date have yet to be released.

 Deputy Stanton vowed to keep up the pressure on the issue, even though he is now a member of the senior party in the present government. With Fine Gael now in Government, he admitted he was becoming “quite frustrated, to be honest”.