Thursday, 9 March 2023

Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (19:30): (103) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to the MRIs at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Now, as we know the Metro Tunnel project is going right underneath there, and there has been some concern for quite some time that electromagnetic interference from the underground trains in the Metro Tunnel works will affect the operation of the MRIs, the magnetic resonance imaging machines, and some other sensitive machines that are operating out of Peter MacCallum. Of course they do tremendous work in treating patients with cancer. As a result of these Metro Tunnel works the MRIs have had to be moved off site and into the Royal Melbourne and the Royal Women’s, and patients are going to have to go and have treatment there. This was confirmed back in May last year. The Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Jacinta Allan at the time said that the underground trains would disrupt the work of the MRI machines.

I have had correspondence from an oncologist this week who is very concerned that her colleagues that work at Peter Mac are hearing that in fact the removal of the machines is not going to be for a temporary time, as was first suggested, but could be of a more permanent nature because of the works and because of how long they are taking. I did assure them. I said, ‘Look, I think it is just temporary while the works are going on.’ The action I seek from the minister is to provide an updated scheduling of the works and give a time frame of how long the disruption will be and how long patients will have to be going to other hospital sites to get their very vital MRI scans for the management and treatment of their cancer.