KEVON FELMINE
kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

The chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the South-West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA), Dr Bri­an Ar­mour, says he will look in­to claims that cer­tain doc­tors are ask­ing pa­tients to pay for Com­put­erised To­mog­ra­phy (CT) scans at pri­vate fa­cil­i­ties as the equip­ment at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal is down.Re­spond­ing to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia at the SWRHA’s vir­tu­al pub­lic board meet­ing on Thurs­day, Ar­mour said the hos­pi­tal has two CT scan­ners.

He said there is a 64-slice scan­ner in the Emer­gency De­part­ment that med­ical staff use for emer­gency, in-pa­tient and out­pa­tient cas­es.

The hos­pi­tal re­ceived an­oth­er 64-slice scan­ner ear­li­er this year for its Ra­di­ol­o­gy De­part­ment, but it is await­ing com­mis­sion­ing by the Min­istry of Health. The SWRHA caters to 600,000 cit­i­zens in a ge­o­graph­i­cal ex­panse that cov­ers more than one-third of Trinidad.

Last year, the sur­gi­cal teams per­formed over 15,000 surg­eries. 
In a re­cent case, a 67-year-old woman went to the hos­pi­tal last week for a post-op­er­a­tion eval­u­a­tion. Af­ter wait­ing for over four hours, a nurse called her in­to the ward. Af­ter the doc­tors re­viewed her case, they told her to vis­it a pri­vate fa­cil­i­ty for a CT Scan as the ma­chine at the hos­pi­tal was not work­ing.

The pen­sion­er said a re­cent pro­ce­dure at a pri­vate hos­pi­tal de­plet­ed her sav­ings and she still had to go to the hos­pi­tal for a surgery which re­quired ex­pen­sive post-op­er­a­tion med­ica­tion. She said it was hard to find thou­sands of dol­lars more to pay for a CT scan.
But Ar­mour said ask­ing pa­tients to pay for med­ical care is not an SWRHA pol­i­cy.
“I am not im­me­di­ate­ly aware of that. It is not the pol­i­cy of the SWRHA. Per­sons are en­ti­tled to re­ceive health­care free of charge. We take note of the ques­tion and can look in­to that mat­ter fur­ther, but I am not aware of that phe­nom­e­non oc­cur­ring. The CT scan­ners are op­er­at­ing at this time,” Ar­mour said.

He said the ma­chine be­gan ex­pe­ri­enc­ing prob­lems ear­li­er this year and even­tu­al­ly shut­down. The SWRHA had it re­paired in March.
Ar­mour said, “All equip­ment has chal­lenges. The CT scan­ner, ini­tial­ly ear­li­er in the year as far as I can re­call, was down for a lit­tle while be­cause of an is­sue with the tube. That was re­paired since on or around March this year, and the up­time has been vir­tu­al­ly 100 per cent. We ac­tu­al­ly have one CT scan­ner at the Emer­gency De­part­ment, and we have a sec­ond CT scan­ner ma­chine that is await­ing fi­nal com­mis­sion­ing by the Min­istry of Health so soon we will have not one but two CT scan­ners.”

SWRHA treat­ed COVID-19 pa­tients

Al­though the meet­ing was to ac­count for 2019, Ar­mour cov­ered the SWRHA’s COVID-19 re­sponse, say­ing that it treat­ed 20 con­firmed cas­es in neg­a­tive-pres­sure iso­la­tion rooms and trans­ferred them to the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal. He said, SWRHA es­tab­lished In­ci­dent Com­mand Sys­tems in each coun­ty and re­pur­posed a ward as the des­ig­nat­ed area for treat­ment and care of sus­pect­ed COVID-19 cas­es.
He added that the re­fur­bished lab­o­ra­to­ry at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal now has the test­ing plat­form tech­nol­o­gy for the COVID-19 ma­chine, which is al­so await­ing com­mis­sion­ing by the Min­istry of Health.
In re­view­ing 2019, SWRHA chair­man Dr Va­lerie Al­leyne-Rawl­ins said the re­gion’s five emer­gency de­part­ments had 254,489 pa­tient vis­its as com­pared to 262,648 in 2018. Among its ac­com­plish­ments, Al­leyne-Rawl­ins said the Board of Di­rec­tors over­saw the re­duc­tion of tele­phone ex­pen­di­ture, in­creased nurs­ing staff,  re­duced the abuse of over­time, in­tro­duced cost-ef­fec­tive meal com­bi­na­tions and re­duced med­ical equip­ment rental costs by procur­ing sur­gi­cal equip­ment.