Groves Memorial Community Hospital is poised to start a new procedure aimed at keeping local breast cancer patients closer to home for treatment.
To do that the hospital has purchased a $45,000 piece of equipment known as a gamma probe – and the equipment is the result of community donations to a larger fundraising campaign currently underway at the Fergus hospital.
General surgeon Dr. Tina Williams is looking forward to putting the equipment to use, although to do so she needs a patient or patients suffering from the illness.
“This is intended to repatriate our cancer care patients to our hospital,” the doctor said, referring to treatments that otherwise would have been done in Kitchener or Guelph.
A small dose of radioactive fluid is injected into the patient before breast cancer surgery in a bid to determine whether cancer cells exist in the lymph nodes. These nodes are identified by the gamma probe.
“If a woman has breast cancer we want to take the cancer out and sample the nodes,” Williams said.
“In the operating room it helps me locate the nodes that may be affected by malignancy.”
It’s a reversal of previous procedures where doctors simply removed nodes without having the ability to identify whether they were cancerous or not. And that is a procedure the doctor doesn’t want to do again.
“I don’t even offer to do it the old fashion way,” she said.
The procedure is considered “standard care” in hospital terms – and Groves wants to keep pace with changing times.
Training of operating room nurses and lab technicians to handle the samples is currently underway. Once that is complete, the procedure is in place.
“It’s not like rocket science,” Williams said.
Sherri Sutherland, executive director of the Groves Hospital Foundation, said the hospital fundraising drive for this year includes a $230,000 ultrasound machine, $55,000 Giraffe baby warmer and $82,500 Sterrad device used to sterilize the probe and other hospital surgical equipment.
The foundation has been successful with previous fundraising efforts and expects to meet its goal to add new equipment also considered part of standard hospital care.
According to Sutherland, the baby warmer will allow for additional care of newborns without having to move them to other beds in the hospital for any additional treatment.
“The newborn can go from mother to Giraffe. It gives the opportunity to stay in one place until the baby is ready for a crib,” she said of the need for newborns and mothers to stay together.
“It’s designed with the thought it’s the best care for the baby.”
The ultrasound equipment is also top of the line. Sutherland describes the upgrade as akin to the difference between “an old black and white television to HDTV.”
Both agree fundraising efforts undertaken by the hospital are successful because of a “caring community.”
Donations to the equipment fund can be made by contacting the foundation office at 519-843-2010 ext. 3268 or by logging on to www.donategroves.ca.
