Canadian doctors gift Ghana with CT scanner

SASKATOON — Two Saskatoon doctors who have helped deliver millions of dollars in medical supplies and training to the West African country of Ghana are about to make their biggest delivery yet.

Obstetric specialists Dr. Wendy Gore-Hickman and Dr. Emmanuel Yeboah, who regularly travel to Ghana to help teach safe childbirth, will be taking a CT scanner with them this year.

There is currently only one CT scanner in Ghana, a country of more than 22 million people. The new scanner will be the only one in the northern region, where people often have to travel more than a day to access adequate medical care.

“Half the reason that people die there is the transport,” said Gore-Hickman.

The CT scanner will allow Ghanaian doctors to do a range of diagnostic work, providing detailed internal images of patients from head to toe.

“It will help thrust them a bit forward,” said Yeboah.

Yeboah and Gore-Hickman began their work with Ghana in 2005, when they joined the American organization Kybele and began travelling to the city of Accra each year with a team of specialists to conduct training seminars in obstetrics.

“We found out they didn’t have basic supplies, like local anesthetics, catheters things like that,” said Yeboah.

Then they discovered Canadian Food for the Hungry International (CFHI). To their surprise, CFHI had a 13,500-square-foot warehouse right in Saskatoon that was full of used and refurbished medical supplies for developing countries.

The supplies are free, the only cost involved is the shipping.

Through a stroke of good fortune, CFHI managed to locate a CT scanner that was originally bound for Israel but became mired in red tape.

CFHI got in touch with the Waterloo, Ont., business person who had purchased the machine and he shipped it to Saskatoon, where it arrived in a crate covered in red wrapping paper and with a map attached, showing the package’s route to Africa.

A card on it read, “A gift to the people of Ghana.”

For only $15,000 in shipping, Gore-Hickman and Yeboah are sending the scanner to Ghana along with a shipment of more than $2 million worth of equipment.

The shipping cost is primarily paid for through donations from Gore-Hickman and Yeboah’s colleagues.

Ghana is a good recipient for the supplies, she says, because the country is developed enough to actually have the infrastructure to use high-tech equipment such as a CT scanner.

“Before we send something like that we have to make sure they have the facilities to take it. . . . They are right on the cusp. They have the infrastructure, they have the people. They just need training.”