Only state PET scanner offline after years of neglect, Ministry says
Ministry: technical fault in the cyclotron and long-term maintenance lapses left the only public PET scanner offline; clinics are triaging patients.
The single state-owned PET scanner at the University Institute for Positron Emission Tomography (UI PET) is currently out of service because of a technical fault and years of neglected maintenance, the Ministry of Health said.
“The current outage was caused by a technical problem in the production of radioisotopes, related to the cyclotron,” the Ministry wrote in a statement, adding that an authorized service team is working intensively to fix the defect and return the device to operation as soon as possible.
According to the Ministry, the fault stems from long-term neglect: “The problem arises from years of neglect – in recent years the protocol for preventive maintenance of the diffusion pump was not consistently followed, including its regular cleaning and the replacement of the oil every five years. This situation is the result of systemic shortcomings accumulated over a long period, for which the current management is taking measures to address the issue immediately after it was detected,” the statement said.
Hospitals triaging patients; opposition criticizes gap in services
The disruption has prompted the Clinic of Oncology and Radiotherapy and the Clinic of Hematology to triage patients using other available diagnostic methods while the PET-CT remains offline.
Earlier, the political party Levica said that the state PET/CT, which is important for assessing the extent of malignant disease and treatment response, has been out of service for months. Levica claimed that patients were turned away several times and some were forced to seek scans at private facilities or abroad, where, according to the party, diagnostics cost about €1,300.
“The non-functioning PET/CT is just one example of the wider chaos oncology patients have faced for years – sometimes there is no medicine, other times no diagnostics, another time no appointment, and for patients from the countryside there is the added burden of constant travel to Skopje. Thus, a cancer patient is not only dealing with a serious illness, but also with a system that forces them to fight for basic health care that should be guaranteed,” Levica said.
Photo: kallerna / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
