Health Dept should budget for equipment

MENDI Hospital in Southern Highlands has a new computerised tomography (CT) scan setup.
While the cost of the establishment of CT scan cannot be ignored, its establishment will require a wide array of human resource backup, accessories support, power support and others.
Provincial health authorities (PHAs) will need the support and advice of the national standard and compliance division of the Health Department to ensure this happens in the right way and PHAs should not do it alone.
Southern Highlands health authority chief executive officer Joseph Birisi has done that.
Birisi’s team did not want their people to be left behind.
They should be congratulated for their achievement.
I thank the Pacific International Hospital who were the first to bring CT scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan into the country.
Port Moresby General Hospital (PMGH) followed next and then Kundiawa Hospital to explore the new frontier of radiology in Papua New Guinea.
Buka Hospital took on the challenge and has managed to acquire the scans as well.
Lae International Hospital and Angau Memorial Hospital did not want to take the technical knockout so they jumped on board.
Mendi Hospital has become the second hospital in the Highlands to get a CT scan.
With the direction that the country has empowered the PHAs to deal with the affairs of health in their provinces, willing provinces who want to take the risk and try something out will evolve.
We may not necessarily have the manpower, but if we have the willingness to get there, we will get there eventually.
In the beginning, aidpost orderlies were running health services in the country, then came the nurses, followed by the health extension officers and then doctors came.
Our advancement in health and delivery of health services will follow the same journey.
Criticisms made are not to devalue the efforts, but are to ensure systems are functioning. Goroka Hospital has built a gigantic facility and it is lying idle.
The same is likely to happen with the newly-built level 5 Enga Hospital.
Enga’s new hospital might involve a public-private partnership purposely to avoid the white elephant and ensure that clinical services are running.
The introduction of MRI and CT scans has brought a new dimension to medicine in PNG.
Clinicians were taught to read plain x-rays by themselves very well without radiologist support at most times.
Clinicians believed in what the radiologists wrote in the ultrasound report.
This was part of our clinical life for several decades.
With the introduction of CT scan and MRI, more patients are diagnosed, managed and treated well.
These two radiology modalities have not stolen our 80 per cent provisional diagnosis we make from our clerkship and history taking.
They have saved lives, correctly evaluated diseases and given rise to new surgical techniques that are usually done overseas.
Our own radiologists who sit in front of these machines and computers are getting better at them each day.
A couple of days ago, my professor, my registrar and I weren’t convinced on a CT scan of the temporal region and brain.
We asked for second opinion from the radiologist.
Dr Monica Clement’s opinion did not deviate from my team’s opinion.
Why was my team’s opinion the same as Clement’s?
My professor has had head and neck experience reading CT scan and MRI scan in India before coming to PNG, my colleague and I had 12 months stints in Australia as well, and now, my team has truly acknowledged what PMGH radiologists are doing.
Post-graduate registrars are vigorously pushed to know the art of reading CT scan and MRI scan of the head and neck regions.
As PMGH is the national referral, teaching and research hospital, it is its role to have a say, share teach the other cadre of health workers in the PHA health system.
This is the function of PMGH, given its name tag and level 6 status.
So, PHAs should not hesitate to seek assistance, skills sharing and partnership with the PMGH management and its board to achieve this.
The question every PHA and health worker should be asking is: “Why are other stakeholders and partners purchasing CT scan and MRI scan for hospitals and not the Health Department?”
The Health Department should budget for these equipment for level 6 and 5 hospitals in the country.

Dr James Naipao,
Otolaryngology Head and Neck
Surgeon