The Cath lab at the Colonial War Memorial (CWM) Hospital in Suva is operational and serving the people, says Health Minister Dr Ifereimi Waqainabete.
While informing Parliament yesterday of the reasons that led to the malfunction and in-operational status of the Cath lab equipment and angiogram, he said the previous Cath lab was installed in 2009 and 2010, however, in 2020, the machine started having some issues.
“Unfortunately, there came a stage where we could not fix it any more,” he said.
“And then discussions were done on being able to bring forward the current machine that we have now that is working at CWM.”
He said the Cath lab at the CWM Hospital was the only one for Fiji in 2009 and 2010.
“And throughout the period with the tax incentives that have been put in place and the support to the private hospitals, we now have a Cath lab available in Oceania and also at Heart International.
“What we’ve also done during the period, that is in between the last one to two years when the Cath lab wasn’t working, those patients that we were able to pick up from the system, we were able to support them, depending on the threshold in terms of their salaries, as we do with any other cases that we send overseas.”
He said Healthcare Fiji would be coming online and offering cardiovascular services.
“We also have begun discussions and we put it as a policy in the budget, that we would like to outsource some of these interventional and also diagnostic work that’s being done within the public hospital system.”
