WINNIPEG — Patients who have appointments to get special scans in Winnipeg on Friday and next week will have to be rebooked due a sewer backup.
The Winnipeg Health Authority says the sewer backup on Tuesday led to a power outage affecting three floors of the Buhler Centre, operated by the University of Manitoba and located on the Health Sciences Centre’s Winnipeg campus.
The authority operates a number of services out of the building, including the positron emission tomography (PET) CT scanner.
It says that scanner does eight to 10 patients a day, and 25 scans have been cancelled so far and another 10 scans scheduled for Friday have also been cancelled.
The authority and the university say it's likely scans scheduled for next week will also have to be cancelled until components for the building's electrical system arrive, are installed and power is fully restored, which is expected by the end of next week.
A PET CT scanner uses radiation, or nuclear medicine imaging, to produce three-dimensional, colour images of functional processes within the human body and can be used to detect and help monitor conditions such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and heart disease.
“Many of our patients are oncology patients, including a small number of children," Dana Erickson, chief operating officer of Health Sciences Centre Winnipeg and regional executive responsible for diagnostic imaging, said in a news release.
"This is why we are looking at a variety of alternative options to provide this valuable diagnostic service during the outage and supporting the University of Manitoba to resolve the power outage as soon as possible.
“Once power has been restored we will prioritize patients according to their urgency for care and increase our capacity as rapidly as possible.”
