Local businessman buys MRI for Penticton hospital

PENTICTON – He’s already donated $2 million to the current campaign to buy medical equipment for the new tower being built at Penticton Regional Hospital, and now a local businessman is also buying an MRI scanner for the facility.

David Kampe, who owns Peters Brothers Construction and Inland Contracting, is donating $3 million so the hospital can have its very own MRI scanner, according to a media release from the South Okanagan-Similkameen Medical Foundation.

Magnetic resonance imaging scanners see body tissues which don’t show up in X-rays or other scans.

Currently the Penticton hospital shares a mobile MRI with communities in the Kootenays and it is only available two weeks each month.

“My intention is to have Penticton Regional Hospital become a state of the art facility in the Interior, and I hope that others will join in and help make this wish a reality,” Kampe says in the release.

Along with his donation to the $312.5 million patient care tower; Kampe donated a one-hectare parcel of land south of the hospital worth about $1.5 million. It has been used for staff parking during the construction of the tower. The tower is scheduled to open in 2019.

“Mr. Kampe has made this MRI possible,” Janice Perrino with the foundation says in the release. “Because of him, the community benefits tremendously. There just are not enough words to say thank you.”

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