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Saturday, July 12, 2025

After no MRI at SFGH, patient to have procedure done at Mt Hope

by

Rishard Khan
1683 days ago
20201202
The San Fernando General Hospital.

The San Fernando General Hospital.

A 46-year-old woman who is be­ing treat­ed at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal (SFGH) in need of an ur­gent MRI (mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing) scan be­fore sur­gi­cal­ly re­mov­ing a mass in her brain, has been told she would re­ceive one at the Er­ic William’s Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC).

In­dra Sankar was tak­en to hos­pi­tal af­ter suf­fer­ing a seizure on Sat­ur­day, No­vem­ber 21 where it was dis­cov­ered she had a mass grow­ing on her brain which need­ed to be ur­gent­ly re­moved. How­ev­er, doc­tors at the SFGH were un­able to pro­ceed with the surgery with­out first con­duct­ing an MRI scan.

They were pre­vent­ed from do­ing this as the ma­chine at the hos­pi­tal was not func­tion­ing.

How­ev­er, South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) of­fi­cials told Guardian Me­dia an ex­pe­dit­ed or­der was placed with its sup­pli­er to en­sure the ma­chine is op­er­a­tional with­in the up­com­ing week. 

But fol­low­ing a Guardian Me­dia re­port, Sankar’s daugh­ter (who wished to re­main un­named) said she would in­stead be trans­ferred to the EWM­SC to get the scan done. 

“The di­rec­tor of the health au­thor­i­ty said they would be trans­fer­ring her...Tues­day or Wednes­day so she would do the MRI there. They would see if they can do the surgery with­in a week or a week and a half,” she said.

“He (the doc­tor) said they had to do a list of five most im­por­tant pa­tients to do MRI’s and she was one of the five.”

She said she hoped that the SWRHA was able to get the MRI scan­ner re­paired and op­er­a­tional prompt­ly be­cause sev­er­al pa­tients re­quire the scan.

Mean­while, the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NWRHA) said the CT (com­put­erised to­mog­ra­phy) scan­ner at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal should be­come op­er­a­tional by the end of the week.

In re­sponse to queries by Guardian Me­dia, the NWRHA chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Sal­isha Baksh said the on­ly op­er­a­tional scan­ner with­in her RHA is the one lo­cat­ed at the St James Med­ical Com­plex. 

“The ma­chine at GH­POS is un­der­go­ing main­te­nance works which in­cludes the re­place­ment of sev­er­al parts. It is an­tic­i­pat­ed that CT scan ser­vices at the GH­POS hos­pi­tal will re­sume by the end of the week. In the in­ter­im, CT scans are be­ing out­sourced both pub­lic (NCRHA and ER­HA) and pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions to en­sure the con­ti­nu­ity of med­ical care/man­age­ment and clin­i­cal ser­vices,” she said.

One of the two CT scan­ners at the SFGH is al­so down for main­te­nance but is ex­pect­ed to “re­sume op­er­a­tion in short or­der.” The main scan­ner, Guardian Me­dia was told, is ful­ly op­er­a­tional.

East­ern Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (ER­HA), chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Ronald Tsoi-a-Fatt said their scan­ner was ful­ly op­er­a­tional and “work­ing beau­ti­ful­ly.”


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