MVarietyNews.com

MAJURO — The only CT scanner in the Marshall Islands broke at the weekend, and health officials were scrambling to order replacement parts estimated to cost $55,000 by the end of this week.

“We’re working on an emergency procurement,” Assistant Health Secretary Dwight Heine said Wednesday.

The problem underlines the challenge of maintaining medical equipment in an isolated Pacific island where there is little equipment backup and no specialized repair services available. A mammogram, another important diagnostic machine used for cancer screening, has just come back online at Majuro Hospital after two years. The CT scanner is sophisticated diagnostic imaging equipment used to detect brain injuries, strokes, tumors and many other ailments.

Majuro Hospital is the main hospital for this western Pacific nation that has a population of about 55,000.

“It is not easy to maintain equipment purchased from overseas,” said Health Secretary Justina Langidrik. One complicating factor is that different pieces of equipment were bought from or provided by different vendors and donors, making it problematic to get one company to provide service to all equipment, she said.

The Ministry of Health has just signed a contract with Guam-based MedPharm to provide preventive maintenance for all x-ray equipment, the CT scanner and the oxygen machine that Langidrik hopes will improve the current situation.

The CT scan’s transformer sprung a leak, shutting down the scanning machine.

Because delays in getting the CT scanner repaired could cost the Ministry of Health tens of thousands of dollars in emergency off-island referrals, the Ministry is declaring the purchase an “emergency,” which lets it avoid time-consuming government procurement rules requiring multiple bids for the purchase, said Heine.

Langidrik expressed concern about costs to send patients off-island to get CT scans while Majuro’s equipment is down. “It’s a public health threat” not to have the CT scanner functioning, Heine said of the need to expedite the costly emergency part replacement.

 After nearly two years with no functioning mammogram machine, Majuro Hospital resumed the cancer-screening in the last several weeks. The hospital has scheduled mammograms to happen on Thursdays only until demand picks up, Langidrik said.

“We’re taking a look at the load and we’ll expand the service (as demand dictates),” she said.