K.H.M.H. receives CT Scan training
We often run stories on new medical advances in Belize, usually involving the acquisition of high-tech equipment. But what we sometimes fail to realise is that without the necessary human element, those machines remain useless. Today the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital finally put together the right combination.
Jacqueline Godwin, Reporting
Today, this woman was just one of several patients who benefited from the use of K.H.M.H.?s state of the art CAT scan machine. The equipment which was first introduced at the hospital a year ago has rarely been in operation because the hospital still has no radiologist on staff and its specialists were not fully trained to use the technology. But over the past few days the medical facility?s technicians have been receiving a crash course that will make this critical area very much a part of the hospital?s fulltime service.
The participants are being trained by a highly qualified team of medical specialists from the United States.
Dr. John Lammers, Radiologist, Elmbrook Hospital
?It is a wonderful scanner that they have here and I think that they need to augment their training a little bit, and we have come down to help do that.?
?Well we have a group of four led by Dr. Mark Bruce, who is an emergency room physician from Elmbrook Hospital in Brookfield Wisconsin. He is joined by his wife who is a family practitioner also in Brookfield Wisconsin and I am a radiologist from the same hospital and we have also, joining our group is a specialist, technology specialist, and she is primarily doing training of the CT technologists here at the K.H.M.H. to help them use the CT scanner to a more advantage.?
The team looked at several cases that included lumbar, head and abdominal CT scanning.
Dr. Mark Bruce, E.R. Physician, Elmbrook Hospital
?The CT scan gives us very detailed images. It is an excellent machine and excellent technology. It?s very cost efficient because it eliminates a lot of unnecessary testing. It gives us many answers very quickly and so it allows us as clinicians to be more precise in our diagnosis, much more focused for what we do for patients because of that information that we get.?
?We are just trying to get out of that machine everything that it can do and the technicians are key to that.?
The specialists leave the country next week Monday. Following their departure it is hoped the K.H.M.H. will soon have on its staff a fulltime radiologist.
The U.S. team also brought along the first of many emergency life support pacers for cardiac cases. The donation of the equipment is a follow up to a training course conducted last year by the visiting specialists.
