PAEC Chairman engineer Pervez Butt stated this in his message to the six-day workshop held on the topic "The first PAEC workshop on color Doppler Imaging and Mammography" here at Minar center.
The workshop will provide participants basic information about the Nuclear Medicines from all NMI with the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the modalities and acquire basic skills in the techniques.
The PAEC Chairman said the commission was running 13 nuclear medicine and oncology centers, and could rightfully be proud of being the biggest player in that field. Through continued commitment the PAEC has achieved a pre-eminent position in the country's fight against cancer and in the field of nuclear medicine. The PAEC has added another dimension in the field of cancer diagnosis by its initiative of establishing a nation-wide breast care clinic network.
At an initial cost of more than 157 million, all 13 PAEC medical centers have the equipment in the form of mammography machines, stereotactic adaptors and Doppler ultrasound units to setup a breast care clinic. Soon, these centers will be given mobile mammography units, enabling them to take the services near the patients.
Biosciences Member Dr Kausar Abdullah said that cancer was a dreadful word, with a dreadful connotation, and rightly so it seemed, because the news that you or a loved one has cancer conjured images of pain and financial exhaustion.
The provincial teaching hospitals, the Zakat foundation and the Bait-ul-Maal has been providing co-operation to the PAEC on the challenge of providing effective diagnostic and treatment facilities to the people of Pakistan.
He emphasised that most of the facilities offered at various PAEC medical centers are free or heavily subsidised, the revenues generated barely make up 25 percent of the actual expenditure. We were very proud of the fact that our services were affordable even to the very poor because most of it was free.
The PAEC headquarters has directed every center to hold awareness seminars, workshops and screening workshop. The equipment installed has added the modality of Color Doppler Imaging to the already extensive list of facilities being offered by the PAEC medical centers and the first three days of the workshop will be dedicated to teaching the participants the most rational and effective use of Doppler imaging.
Minar Director Dr Dure-i-Sabhi said the first they had been given funds for upgradation, they were going to use that money to add more working space in the form of a new block, refurbish the old block and buy new equipment.
Nishtar Medical College has been given an additional bit of land adjacent to the Minar center. The Minar is also collaborating with the Bahauddin Zakaria University to launch a diploma course in medical physics in the next academic year that starts in September 2005 and introduce the subject of imaging physics.
The Minar was providing regular internship experience to the students of pharmacy and more recently biology, he added.
The Minar has done great work under the auspices of the PAEC breast screening programme, and started a walk-in mammography service and a consultants breast clinic that has a surgeon, a physician an oncologist and a mammography expert examine the patients.The Minar offered training facilities to technicians, and also offered reporting facilities to the PAEC centers in mammography if that was needed, scans could be acquired and sent to us for reporting and we would do so until your own skills develop enough to allow independent reporting, he concluded.