Hospital waiting list to grow with loss of machine

Cancer treatment waiting times for some Manawatu patients are expected to grow until Palmerston North Hospital gets a new radiation therapy machine up and running.

The hospital's oldest linear accelerator - a machine that fires a focused radiation beam into the body to destroy a tumour - broke down for the last time last month and has been dismantled and removed.

The machine was scheduled to be closed down at the end of last month.

MidCentral Health spokesman Dennis Geddis said a replacement linear accelerator, worth more than $3 million, was expected to arrive at the hospital at the end of this month.

It would take several weeks to install and test and would not be ready for use until mid-November, he said.

Until then, some patients could face increases in radiotherapy waiting times, while the hospital was forced to operate with just two linear accelerators.