Bluewater Health has a new tool to help in the fight against COVID-19.
Director of Diagnostic Imaging Deirdre Shipley said a portable digital X-ray unit arrived at the hospital last month.
Shipley said since the virus is a respiratory illness, essentially all COVID-19 patients will have to have a chest X-ray at some point.
"Rather than transporting these patients around the hospital down to the X-ray department, it is much safer for us to keep them in their own environment and bring the machine up to them," she said. "Our volume of portable imagining has gone up significantly since the pandemic was declared. The vast majority of our patients are done portably now rather than transporting them, so it has been a lifeline for our X-ray technologists."
Shipley said they recognized rather quickly after the pandemic was declared, that the X-ray unit was a need for the hospital.
She said normally it takes months for a machine like this to arrive, compared to weeks.
"So we were actually able to expedite that purchase, and the vendor actually had received three years worth of orders in just eight days. And the really good news is that Bluewater Health was one of the first hospitals to put our order in, we were very proactive, so we were able to get out equipment very quickly."
Shipley said it's a piece of equipment they'll be able to use well into the future.
