Royal Inland Hospital.

(ASHLEY LEGASSIC - REPORTER / iNFOnews.ca)

If the province won't budge on its refusal to add a specialized scanner to the long-awaited Kamloops cancer centre, local politicians want it somewhere else in the city.

Clearwater mayor Merlin Blackwell said continued efforts to convince cabinet ministers the cancer centre should include a PET/CT scanner remain unsuccessful, and Kamloops shouldn't be the only one of four new cancer centres in BC not to have one.

"It does not necessarily have to go into the same building as the cancer centre. So, we're going to keep pushing, even if it's at an off-site location in Kamloops," Blackwell, who is also a board member on the Thompson Regional Hospital District, said.

The scanner combines two different imaging technologies and is one of the most accurate methods to detect cancerous cells, according to the BC Cancer Foundation.

In Nanaimo, Burnaby and Surrey, new BC Cancer Centres will all include the scanner, while patients expected to be treated in Kamloops will head to Kelowna for the scan.

"As we know, winter travel is dangerous and anything that you need to do from Kamloops, let alone the far reaches of the treatment zone like Lillooet, Williams Lake, 100 Mile House and Blue River, those are... pretty much guaranteed to need an overnight trip," Blackwell said.

It's the same argument Kamloops-area officials have taken to the province over the lack of local radiation therapy for years, now coming to fruition with the provincial government's commitment to build the $359 million facility next to Royal Inland Hospital.

Local politicians on the hospital district board, along with Conservative MLAs Ward Stamer and Peter Milobar, have pushed the province to redesign the clinic to include the scanner, but infrastructure minister Bowin Ma has said it's not possible to add. If the cancer centre was to be redesigned, it would push the project back even further.

The hilly terrain where Royal Inland sits makes a redesign more difficult, Blackwell said.

"If we were looking at where to build a hospital now, we wouldn't put it there," he said. "We would put it on the North Shore or somewhere with a nice, flat chunk of land."

He said the "long overdue" project should go ahead as planned to avoid any further delays, but he still wants the province to commit to adding a PET/CT scanner elsewhere in the city.

"We feel it's important and people in the community still feel it's important, so we're going to keep pushing it. We're just not going to derail an entire cancer centre and a whole new level of treatment for regional residents over this," he said.

Ma, along with health minister Josie Osborne, will be in Kamloops Thursday, July 24 for a groundbreaking ceremony at the future cancer centre site.

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