No staff, colonoscopy equipment sits unused
01.11.2007 15:00
Health
- Source: cbc.ca
New equipment for screening for colon cancer has been sitting in boxes for months, raising concerns about waiting times for colonoscopies in the Halifax region. At the Cobequid Community Health Centre in Lower Sackville, endoscopes and other hardware worth about $300,000 that are necessary to detect colon cancer have not been used since they were purchased in January. Barbara Hall, the Capital District Health Authority's vice-president of community care, blames a staffing crunch. "This has been a priority and the only reason we couldn't get it going sooner than this is because of being unable to pull together the physician and the nursing resources to make it happen," Hall said. Dr. Desmond Leddin, head of endoscopy at the district, fears many people waiting for the procedure may never get one. He said Nova Scotia has an unusually high rate of colon diseases. And there are about 250,000 people in the province older than 50, when the risk of colon cancer increases exponentially. "There is a big unmet demand out there for service. I hear it from family doctors and patients all the time. I don't have any direct evidence statistically, but certainly anecdotally reports of delayed diagnosis are quite common," Leddin said. The waiting list is "infinite," he said. Hall said the clinic in Lower Sackville should be open by the spring, for one day a week. Meanwhile, Leddin continues to work out of an office at the Centennial Building in Halifax, where he said patients will be taken care of when they can obtain appointments. "For any of us who's been in a position where you're anxious about your health, or found something and you had to wait or you were told that you would possibly never be seen, it's a completely unsatisfactory situation," he said.
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