Northern Manitoba mobile MRI makes first move in 15 months

Northern Manitoba’s mobile MRI made its first move since it began scanning in Thompson nearly 15 months ago, setting up shop Monday in The Pas.

“It’s really exciting that we finally have this piece of equipment here,” said Dayna McTaggart, a medical radiological technologist in The Pas and provincial manager for the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists Manitoba.

The mobile MRI will travel between the two communities that are 400 kilometres apart in an effort to strengthen northern health-care delivery, the provincial government said in a news release.

“This rotation ensures patients in northern communities have easier, more equitable access to vital diagnostic imaging without the burden of long-distance travel,” Dr. AbdulRazaq Sokoro, Shared Health’s chief operating officer of diagnostic services, said in the release.

Since beginning operations on June 6, 2025 next to the Thompson General Hospital, the mobile unit has completed more than 3,000 tests according to Shared Health.

It’s allowed more northern families to access advanced diagnostic care closer to home, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said in the release. It has reduced travel time for patients from Thompson, Flin Flon, The Pas, Split Lake, Cross Lake and Gillam.

“We’ve been told right from the start that the objective of this equipment was to provide services closer for home for residents of the North, and it has absolutely done that,” McTaggart said Monday.

Staffing the mobile MRI unit and finding technologists willing to travel and work away from from home had been a challenge, McTaggart said in March.

Since then, return of service agreements — in which medical students or international medical graduates agree to work in underserved communities in exchange for financial assistance or credit toward licensing — led to the hiring of more full-time staff from Thompson who travel with the mobile MRI. They work seven days on and seven days off so they can go home on their breaks, with part-time staff from Winnipeg filling in, she said.

McTaggart doesn’t know when the MRI will return to Thompson but said she’s aware of scans in The Pas scheduled until at least Sept. 3. The province could not confirm Tuesday how long the MRI will remain in The Pas.

Once there’s frost on the ground, the magnetic resonance imaging machine will likely remain parked for the winter, probably in Thompson, McTaggart said.

“It’s not just as simple as pulling up into a parking lot and plugging it in and you’re ready to go,” she said.

“There are certain zones for patient protection in and around the magnet that need to be established.” MRI rooms have a strict no-metal rule because the scanner’s magnet is extremely powerful.

“There’s a lot more involved that the general public and even some of us in health care didn’t appreciate or didn’t recognize until it started to happen,” the radiological technician said.

“Setting that all up was a lot of work. I definitely think that Shared Health and the Manitoba government do deserve acknowledgment for having accomplished that,” McTaggart said.

All scans in the mobile unit require an advance referral from a licensed health-care provider. Patients in the region who require diagnostic imaging are encouraged to discuss the mobile MRI unit with their health-care provider, the province said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca