Remaining current with the latest technology can be challenging for even the largest hospital systems, let alone for small community facilities. When they needed a new digital x-ray system, administrators, physicians, and townspeople in the Canadian town of Seaforth got creative in finding money for the technology.
After two years of a three-year fundraising drive being quarterbacked by the Seaforth Community Hospital Foundation, administrators and physicians from the 18-bed hospital worked with local residents to raise the $450,000 needed to buy and install a new digital radiography (DR) system (DigitalDiagnost, Philips Healthcare, Andover, MA). A similar effort led to the installation of a digital x-ray system at the hospital in nearby Clinton. Both hospitals are part of the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance.
Seaforth Hospital's new unit went live on October 2.
Dr. Heather Percival, one of the five family physicians who serve the Seaforth population of approximately 10,000 people, told AuntMinnie.com that she and other physicians in the region were pressing for a digital x-ray machine to replace a film-based unit that was 20 years old. One of the drawbacks of the old technology was the films had to be driven to another center for radiologist review.
Use of their new digital x-ray machine allows a maximum 24-hour turnaround time for radiologist review. And after-hours emergency films are read immediately -- rather than with the prior delay of one to four days -- by a call group of radiologists in Ontario on weekdays and weekends, and by a radiologist in Europe between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. during the week.
Brenda Scott, program director of medical imaging for the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance -- which also comprises the hospitals in St. Marys and the larger center of Stratford -- said the facility decided to go with DR rather than computed radiography.
"We were at the end of the life of the old equipment," recalled Scott. "And we opted to go with digital as opposed to computed radiography because digital is easier on the staff and, hence, on the patients. ... We wanted something that would be current not just for now, but for a while into the future."
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