admin
Rejoice Makoni Herald Correspondent
Radiotherapy is being revived at Government central hospitals after US$2,4 million was released with the Varian company now agreeing to repair the machines, with a three years warrant of service, acting chief medical officer Dr Aspect Maunganidze told a Parliamentary portfolio committee touring Parirenyatwa radio therapy centre yesterday.
The committee led by Dr Ruth Labode was responding to petitions to intervene over therapy for cancer patients and treatments.
This followed reports that the radio therapy machines had not been working since last year and patients were only receiving chemotherapy and referred to private hospitals for radio therapy, which was very costly.
Dr Maunganidze said the resumption of public radio therapy services will go a long way in helping cancer patients access treatment.
“We have been doing ad hoc repairs for more than five years until we realised that the number of repairs became too frequent and we then decided to look at the situation holistically and made sure that no one repairs the machines without giving a service level agreement,” he said.
“After the machines are fully repaired by Varian, we are guaranteed of three years of undisrupted services due to the three years warrant of service agreement. The team of technicians from Varian will be on the ground in the next few weeks and the machines will soon be back online.”
Head of department, oncologist Dr Nothando Mutizira said they were performing chemotherapy and brachytherapy only.
“We have been offering chemotherapy and brachytherapy because there are some cancers you can just ignore because of severity,” she said.
“Every week we do three clinics, that is three for new cancer patients and the other for patients that are already in the system. We attend 60 to 100 patients a day and we expect to see an increase in numbers as soon as the machines are back online. We are doing brachytherapy for cervical cancer.”
Dr Mutizira said the top four cancers they were treating were cervical cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer and stomach cancer although others were also being treated.
She said there were only 12 oncologists in the country.
The Government has been committed to improving cancer treatment in the country through the attainment of the 60 percent survival rate of children diagnosed with cancer by 2030.
Online Reporter