The Lake of the Woods District Hospital held a grand opening last weekend to mark the addition of two new areas to its diagnostic imaging department — a fluoroscopy suite and echocardiography/biopsy room.
Sean Hailstone, the hospital's manager of diagnostic imaging, said the equipment replaces versions that were out of date, with the previous fluoroscopy equipment decommissioned in 2021.
“For safety purposes for our patients and our staff, we had to decommission the machine,” he said. “With newer technology and lower radiation dose, we now have the ability to [assess] pediatric patients.”
The new unit exposes patients to roughly one tenth the radiation compared to the previous machine. Hailstone said it delivers among the lowest dose units on the market today, adding the hospital is the first site in Canada to install the full setup of the new Siemens equipment.
Hailstone explained that fluoroscopy is live imaging, while an x-ray is a still image.
“It's like a pulse of x-ray,” he said. “So we continually pulse the x-ray at an extremely low dose.”
Among the assessments the hospital can now perform are fluoroscopic swallowing studies with a speech pathologist.
“Say somebody’s had a stroke, or say they've had surgery and their swallowing mechanism isn't as strong and they're choking on food, or they feel a narrowing in the esophagus or something like that, and any time they eat or drink, they cough or they have a really hard time swallowing,” he said.
“So when we do a swallowing assessment, the patient drinks a liquid called barium,” he said. “As they're swallowing, we can watch it live right down the esophagus. It’s live, real-time imaging.”
Hailstone said the hospital is also able to do other types of assessments using the fluoroscopy suite, including scoliosis studies and full leg-length studies.
“All those patients that were traveling to Thunder Bay or Winnipeg for these studies, they can do them right here at home or closer to home. Especially the pediatric patients, to be able to obtain this service close to home is a huge benefit to the parents and the community and to all the physicians,“ he said.
The hospital said it’s the only site outside of Thunder Bay to offer fluoroscopy in Northwestern Ontario.
The new echocardiography room will similarly help meet demand in the region for the service, which provides visualization of how the heart is functioning and performing.
Hailstone said the lifespan on digital x-ray equipment is between 10 to 13 years maximum and it was purchased with the plan to move it to the new hospital currently in the planning stages.
The hospital said the cost of the two projects was nearly $1 million, which came from the Lake of the Woods District Hospital Foundation and provincial funding.
