Delay over MRI machine at TUTH costs public

KATHMANDU, Aug 19: People have been forced to go to private facilities for MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) as a new MRI machine bought by Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) remains unused even over three and half months after delivery.

The Army Hospital and BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences (BPKIHS) in Dharan in eastern Nepal are the only public institutions providing MRI in Nepal.
With the Army Hospital not accessible to civilians, patients in Kathmandu and those from other parts of the country who come here for treatment are forced to cough up more money to avail of the service at private centers.

TUTH has not disclosed the new MRI rate, but hospital sources said it was around Rs 3,000-4,000 cheaper than at private centers when the hospital was providing the service with an old machine that became obsolete over three years ago. Private centers currently charge around Rs 9,000 for the facility.

Capital Enterprises supplied the US$ 428,000 (around Rs 32 million) Hitachi machine at TUTH. As things stand, it will take around a month more for the machine to become operational and even TUTH Director Dr Keshav Prasad Singh admits the installation would take another three weeks to function.

Both the hospital and the supplier, which has to hand the machine over to the hospital in an operational state, call it procedural delay. The machine arrived at the hospital on April 28 but it had to be left within the container on the lorry for the next 39 days as the hospital had not made preparations for installing it.


“We had to remove the old, obsolete machine before installing the new one,” Dr Singh said. The hospital had been going through a lengthy process of procuring the new MRI machine ever since the old one became obsolete, and we were regularly apprised by the suppliers of the arrival date of the new machine. But no arrangements were made for removing the old before the arrival of the new.

“We initiated the process of removing the old machine a year ago, but no applications were received when we called tenders for the job,” Dr Singh said explaining the inexplicable delay. “We finally had to negotiate with one party to carry out the removal,” administrative head at the hospital Chandra Kumar Rai said.

The machine, which is basically a big magnet using a powerful magnetic field for imaging, cannot be unpacked from the container and left around like any ordinary apparatus. The lorry, therefore, had to be kept waiting for 39 days before a place was cleared for the new MRI machine.

Apart from denying people the facility and foregoing possible revenue generation, the delay also meant that the hospital, currently facing a financial crunch, has had to incur additional expenses in keeping the lorry waiting for 39 days. But the hospital refused to disclose the additional cost for the lorry and even the suppliers said nothing more than that they have reached an agreement with the hospital on apportioning the addition cost.

“The machine has to be kept inside a shielded room,” a technician from the suppliers working at the hospital said. “Because of delay in clearing away the old machine, we had to repeatedly cancel the arrival of our engineers here for unloading the new MRI machine and constructing the shield inside the room for housing it,” the technician added.

Source: http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=22331