Prince Edward Island’s first private clinic for magnetic resonance imaging is set to open in Summerside this spring, says one of the new diagnostic centre’s owners.
“Personally, I see patients waiting very, very long times for MRIs, and as we know, it’s been well publicized that the waits are excessive,” said Guy Boswall, a Charlottetown ophthalmologist.
“Now we have patients going to Moncton to have their MRIs, and so we felt this was something that we should be able to deal with on Prince Edward Island.”
Construction is set to begin soon on a building at 107 Walker Ave. to accommodate the clinic.
The diagnostic centre’s owners also recently opened a private cataract clinic in Charlottetown in December 2024.
The idea of a private MRI clinic is “nothing new,” Boswall said.
“There are similar centres across the country that provide medicare-based health care,” he said. “So we’re not doing anything new here on P.E.I.”
Boswall said he hopes the MRI clinic will operate in the same way the cataract clinic does, with Health P.E.I. paying the bill. But there are currently no contracts to make that sort of agreement official.
“Health PEI has not formally engaged with the operators of the MRI clinic opening in Summerside,” the agency said in a emailed statement.
“Health PEI will be launching a procurement procedure in the coming months to explore MRI capacity on the Island to help manage the growing demand for service and to prevent further backlog.”
The health agency said that any provider of MRI services — whether it be the Atlantic Veterinary College or a privately operated clinic like Boswall’s — will be “carefully selected to meet all standards of quality, safety, and value.”
