I don’t know. Do I even need to comment on this story?
The mother of a four-year-old Newfoundland and Labrador boy who lost one kidney to cancer is looking to the United States to obtain for her son timely access to a magnetic resonance imaging machine.
Brenda Oldford, who is a nurse, said yesterday that she is examining U.S. possibilities after learning yesterday from the Canadian Association of Radiologists that no private clinic in Canada can provide comparable care to that offered by hospitals.
Ryan Oldford faces a 21/2-year wait for an MRI scan. A geneticist who suspects that the rambunctious boy has a rare syndrome that puts him at higher risk for leukemia and cancers of the kidney and liver made the request.
[…]
Paying for an MRI scan in a Canadian hospital is not an option because doing so is illegal, Mr. Laberge said.“What Ryan’s case has exposed is the fact that—as ridiculous as this seems—kids have to wait longer than adults. They have to wait longer [for MRI scans] than anybody else because of the sedation that’s needed.”
A shortage of pediatric radiologists and pediatric anesthetists is partly to blame. As one example contributing to this, only three or four of the 16 training residency positions for pediatric radiologists across Canada are filled, he said.
The average wait by a Canadian child for an MRI scan is about 16 months, but the wait in Newfoundland, at 30 months, is by far the worst, Mr. Laberge said.
Geoffrey Higgins, clinical chief of diagnostic imaging at the Health Care Corp. of St. John’s, has said that as many as 100 children in Newfoundland face 30-month waits for scans. While that is “less than ideal,” he said patients’ conditions are investigated and followed by other medical means and that anyone needing an emergency scan gets one.
[…]
Until this week, Mrs. Oldford thought she would take her son to a private Canadian clinic, with the scan being paid for by one of those benefactors. Now that she has learned Canada is not an option, she is disappointed.“I felt let down by Newfoundland, and then I felt let down by Canada,” she said. “Canada’s health-care system is the envy of the world, but once you are inside, you see how individual situations work.”
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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