Hospitals collaborate

THE National Cancer Treatment Centre at Angau Memorial General Hospital in Lae, Morobe, is improving its working relationship with other provincial hospitals to cut down the queues of patients awaiting treatment.
Papua New Guinea’s only resident oncologist Dr John Niblett, who heads the centre, is working at establishing a network of satellite treatment centres in provincial hospitals so patients can have chemotherapy treatment.
With chemotherapy treatment available at every hospital, this effort will free up the operations of the national centre to concentrate on radiotherapy treatment on cancer patients.
“We have a relationship with pretty well every other hospital in the country, including Port Moresby, and far as chemotherapy is concerned much of this can be done in other hospitals just like Kundiawa Hospital is doing,” Niblett said.
“We are encouraging other hospitals to carry out the same kind of arrangement, we are in fact making a mini-centre for the region that the patients are in so that they don’t need to be in Lae for all their treatment.
“Alotau is another example that has done a lot of work for patients by getting chemotherapy done there.”
As part of its serious approach to curbing the lifestyle disease, Kundiawa Hospital in Chimbu has established a new relationship with the centre by sending acting director of medical services Dr Damien Hasalo and gynaecologist Dr Nasser Galdekareem and a team of nurses to spend time with Niblett and his staff and learn from them.
The Kundiawa team, which will be in Lae for a week, saw the arrival of a Selectron machine used in radiotherapy.