Central SA
National Hospital gets new PET-CT scanner to improve cancer care─── REFILWE BEKANE 09:00 Fri, 27 Feb 2026
The National Hospital in Bloemfontein has launched a new digital PET-CT scanner, considered one of the best in the country.
This machine was officially introduced on Thursday (26/2) at an event attended by stakeholders and representatives from the department of health. The introduction of this technology marks the first time a fully digital camera of this type is available for use in the public sector.
The scanner is primarily used in oncology to diagnose and determine the stage of a patient’s cancer. This process helps doctors see exactly where the cancer is and how much it has spread in the body.
In addition to cancer care, the hospital is expanding the use of the machine to include the cardiology and neurology departments for specialised heart and brain scans.
This new machine is a fully digital camera, which differs from standard models. Because it is digital, it can scan patients in a much shorter time, allowing the hospital to treat more people every day.
Additionally, the machine uses less radioactivity, which helps reduce costs for patients while providing high-quality medical images.
“The other advantage of such a camera is we hope to attract clinical trials to the health department and the oncology department,” said the nuclear medicine head of department Dr Gerrit Engelbrecht.
The arrival of the scanner follows a long planning period that began decades ago. While the project was initially paused, it was restarted in 2014.
The hospital also focused on increasing staff numbers before the machine was purchased. Having the equipment on-site now allows the facility to train its own specialist doctors, known as registrars, rather than sending them to other centres. A maintenance plan has been included in the project to ensure the machine remains operational 24 hours.
Prof. Evbuomwan Osayande, a nuclear medicine physician, said the machine had already been used to scan more than 300 patients since its arrival.
“The detector crystal and the software hardware package called time of flight has given us the ability to detect diseases much, much earlier, and we see this every single day.”
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