Demand doesn’t justify specialized scanner at future Kamloops cancer centre

The need for a specialized scanner to detect cancer cells isn’t high enough to include it within the new Kamloops Cancer Centre.

That’s according to BC infrastructure minister Bowinn Ma, while she faced questions from reporters at the facility’s future site this week.

Local politicians have continually been told it was too late to redesign the long-awaited centre and a PET/CT scanner won’t be added, despite its inclusion at the three other BC cancer centres also slated for construction in other cities.

Ma said the upcoming cancer centre includes as many services as possible in the small space next to Royal Inland Hospital, and the province decided it couldn’t fit the scanner.

“BC Cancer, working in consultation with Interior Health, had to make decisions about what was most important to bring to the residents of Kamloops as quickly as possible,” she said.

Though design challenges have been largely to blame since local officials began pressing for the scanner to be included, Thompson Regional Hospital District vice chair Merlin Blackwell suggested it could be built elsewhere in Kamloops instead.

Asked about the possibility of adding it to another site, Ma wouldn’t commit on whether the province would do so, but she did suggest the demand for the scanner was too low in the region.

She said people in the Thompson, Cariboo and Shuswap regions currently account for 900 PET/CT scans per year, which is equivalent to one full day of scans per week.

“So, the decision was made to prioritize radiation therapy here,” she said.

When Kelowna’s PET/CT scanner opened in 2020, BC Cancer Foundation said 1,151 scans were conducted in Vancouver for Interior Health region patients over a year-long period. The new Okanagan scanner was expected have much higher demand with 2,000 scans in its first year. It conducted 2,473.

Kelowna hosts the only such scanner in the Interior, while four more are being added at sites in the Lower Mainland and Nanaimo.

The new Kamloops cancer centre ends decades of lobbying to the province for radiation treatment in the Thompson region and means many cancer patients will no longer have to travel to Kelowna for treatment.

Ma said 2,400 people, who would normally be treated at Royal Inland Hospital, travel to Kelowna annually.

“We’re talking each person taking potentially dozens and dozens of trips during the most difficult treatments and recovery periods of their lives,” she said.

The more than $300 million Kamloops cancer centre is expected to be built and taking patients by 2028 with construction slated to start by this fall.