The Ministry of Health has defended its plans to acquire a new computerised tomography (CT) scanner for the University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK), stressing that the existing one is old and very expensive to maintain.

The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health made the case, before parliament, for the acquisition of a Rwf1 billion machine, which creates cross-sectional images of the body, one MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner, using magnetic fields and radio waves to produce internal images, and two ultrasound scanners to address the shortfall.

While experts recommend that the CT scan should be scrapped after 10 years, CHUK uses one that is 12 years old, at times making it inefficient in addition to high costs of maintenance.

According to data from the ministry of health, every year the government incurs a staggering Rwf120 million in maintenance expenses to operate the machine

Besides the high maintenance costs, CHUK, which is one of the main national referral hospitals in the country receives patients from all over the country who need advanced treatment, in most cases exerting pressure on the machine and making it dysfunctional.

There are various risks associated with operating an old machine; one is that patients may not get the precision of treatment that they would otherwise receive from a new machine.

Two, the inefficiency increases the backlog of patients referred for imaging diagnostics.

One of the primary concerns for the ministry of health is that there’s need to upgrade the neonatal intensive care unit at CHUK, particularly to take care of the health of premature babies.

Thus the treasury ought to take the ministry of health request urgently and explore a range of funding options for the new machine.

One funding option that has been proposed by the ministry of health is to support CHUK to acquire the machine through a loan arrangement. This is a viable option because the money that is currently spent on maintaining the old machine would be channelled into servicing the loan for the new equipment.

In the end, there’s no doubt that the investment in this facility will be worthwhile.