New provincial funding is helping Chatham-Kent’s hospital reduce wait times for patients waiting for diagnostic imaging services.
The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance has received a $1 million investment from the Ontario government to increase Computer Tomography (CT) operational capacity in the hospital’s Diagnostic Imaging Department.
The new funding, which will be used to reduce wait times for CT scans, was announced on Thursday by Chatham-Kent Leamington MPP Trevor Jones.
Cynthia Stulp, CKHA’s manager of diagnostic imaging, said the demand for CT services remains a critical priority. She said the provincial investment will help fund an increase in staff on weekends and statutory holidays.
“We are hoping to go later into the night with outpatients. During the day, we always prioritize our emergency patients, our code strokes, our inpatients, and then our outpatients fill up all the other spots throughout the day,” said Stulp. “Saturdays and Sundays, we’re [currently] at a base level staffing, and we want to increase that and get more patients through.”
Both inpatients and outpatients rely on CKHA for essential screenings and regular testing, with the hospital performing around 24,000 CT scans each year.
“It is a lot for a community hospital this size with the number of beds that we have,” said Stulp. “We also receive many requisitions from both the Windsor region and the London region.”
CKHA President and CEO Adam Top said the hospital will be petitioning the provincial government for additional funding in the coming months, with the “aspirational goal” of purchasing a second CT scanner for the hospital.
“We’ve got one CT [machine] that does 24,000 scans a year. If it goes down, that’s a lot of patients who are displaced, that’s a lot of surgeries that may be cancelled,” he said. “It’s a risk management issue.”
The cost to purchase and install a second CT scanner at CKHA is estimated at around $3 million.
