Reports of demise of UNM-G rad tech program premature
This ceiling-mounted x-ray unit is largest component of the more than $300,000 worth of radiology equipment that sits unused at the UNM-G Health Careers Center Thursday.— © 2009 Gallup Independent / Cable Hoover

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — More than $300,000 worth of radiology equipment remains in storage on the University of New Mexico-Gallup campus, waiting for the day when it can be used to get students prepared to become radiology technicians.

But exactly when that day will come is still up in the air.
For Priscilla Smith, however, the fact that the equipment is still there is a major victory.

Smith, along with former state Sen. Lidio Rainaldi, D-Gallup, and supporters at the two Gallup hospitals, managed to do what some people thought would be impossible — get officials at the school to change their plans to sell the equipment.

That was the plan back in November.

Barry Cooney, acting director of the branch, had made it known that plans to hold classes in radiology technology had been canceled after studies indicated that there was not much of a demand for radiology technicians statewide.

Cooney said it didn’t make much sense to spend the money to hire instructors and have students put in all of this time and effort only to find out when they graduated that the supply of technicians was greater than the demand.

“That was ridiculous,” Smith said Wednesday. “If that was true, why has Central New Mexico University (formerly TVI) in Albuquerque starting to offer classes in it?”

During the Christmas season last year, Smith, Rainaldi and the others went to the phone calling up members of the branch’s advisory board and everyone else they could get to listen to them, trying to explain that the course was needed and that the equipment should not be sold.

Part of Smith’s concern may have stemmed from the fact that for a number of years she worked at the branch as a program director for the medical lab program that was supported by the Indian Health Service. This was before she purchased Quick Print and Copy in the mid-1990s.

But her work at the branch convinced her that UNM-Gallup could be a major force in this area in providing young people with the medical and technical experience they needed to make high salaries and provide needed staff to area hospitals.

Another reason for her concern, she said, was that the equipment was purchased by taxpayers through a general obligation bond that was approved in 2004.

“We paid for the equipment and it was just sitting there,” she said.

She said she felt the whole matter was a case of “political football” with the main campus wanting to maintain control of these classes and not allow them to go to the branches.

Cooney said he decided to hold off plans to sell the equipment after talking it over with some of the members of the advisory committee.

But there are still no plans to develop a radiology technician program at the school.

Instead, Cooney said the plans to sell the equipment have been placed on hold, and that it will be left up to whoever is selected to be the college’s permanent director later this year to make a decision on what to do with it.