Aging medical equipment puts Canadian patients at risk: report

Aging medical equipment puts Canadian patients at risk: report Becky Rynor ,  Canwest News ServicePublished: Monday, November 10, 2008

A "startling" amount of aging and outdated medical equipment in Canadian hospitals and clinics is putting patients at risk, warns a report released Monday by the Fraser Institute.

"The unavoidable truth regarding the state of Canada's medical technology inventory is that there are far too many old and outdated machines being used to diagnose and treat the ailments of Canadians," said report author, economist Nadeem Esmail.

John Kenney/The Gazette

Esmail is also the institute's director of health system performance studies in Calgary.

The report used data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information to determine the age and sophistication of medical technology used in Canadian hospitals and other health facilities.

It then compared those equipment inventories to guidelines established by the European Co-ordination Committee of the Radiological and Electromedical Industries, the Canadian Association of Radiologists and an Ontario expert panel on medical imaging techniques.

Those guidelines say that aging units should not comprise more than 10 per cent of a facility's total inventory.

"Yet the Canadian health-care system has two to three times that amount of equipment older than 10 years," Esmail said.

The report says that, in Canadian hospitals, nearly 21 per cent of bone-density meters, more than 24 per cent of angiography suites and 28 per cent of cardiac catheterization labs were more than 10 years old at the start of 2007.

"We're spending more than almost everyone else on our universal access health care system and yet we're seeing these very sizable inventories of old and outdated medical technologies," he said.

Esmail said older equipment has a higher risk of failing or breaking down, may be less accurate or provide poorer quality images, can be less clinically useful and may be incapable of delivering the latest advancements in care.

He points out that the oldest angiography suite in Canada - equipment which allows blood vessels to show up in X-rays - was 45 years old in January, 2007.

"A 45-year-old angiography suite essentially was entering practice in the 1960s. When you look at what an angiography suite does you have to ask the question, is that reasonable?"

The European standards say that machines older than one decade are no longer state-of-the-art and should be replaced.

There may be times, Esmail said, when buying or using a less sophisticated piece of equipment for basic services may save money.

"But when you look at the life cycle of a machine there really isn't a great argument here that we should have a sizable inventory, especially the size of the inventories that we have. There's really no sensible argument that you can make that says 30 per cent of hospital-based MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines should be beyond their life cycle guideline," he said.