Patients in need of MRI and CT scans are being turned away from the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital’s MRI & CT Scan Centre, with the excuse that the machines are not ready for use.

This comes less than a week after the hospital re-commissioned the same repaired MRI machines, X-rays and CT scanning machines.

The MRI and CT scan machines at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital had been out of use for several months, and the repair works and re-commissioning were long overdue.

But dozens of patients and their caregivers were denied access to the service on Monday.

This meant that patients with conditions like multiple sclerosis, stroke, heart diseases, brain aneurysms, cancer, and brain injuries, had to either return to their homes or seek these services from private facilities at a higher cost.

The Management of the hospital is well aware of the situation at the MRI/CT scan centre.

The Public Relations Officer of the hospital, Mustapha Salifu, explained that the holdup has nothing to do with the machines but rather, a payment tracking setback.

“The machines are in perfect working order as we speak now but we need to do some linkages between the machines and the payment system,” he said.

He added that the centre will become functional before the weekends saying “by Wednesday, it will be in good working order.”

“We now have some banks that are responsible for the collection of the fees and charges. We need to configure that. That is what they are working on now. We have also installed CCTV cameras in there. They need to also set that up within the system. So we are using these few days to set up the system properly so that when people come and pay, we can account for every single money that is  charged at the centre.”

For now, patients will continue to go out of Ghana’s premier hospital to get their scans done, hopefully before their conditions get too worse to handle.