The purchase of modern cancer radiation machines for Sri Lanka’s state hospitals has been held up for close to five years, a doctors’ trade union has alleged, leaving patients dependent on technology that most countries have retired.
Dr. Chamal Sanjeewa, a specialist and chairman of the Doctors’ Trade Union Alliance for Medical and Civil Rights, said a prolonged “tug-of-war” between health officials and certain specialists had stalled the procurement of linear accelerators, which are to be bought with funding from the Asian Development Bank and the General Treasury, the Daily Mirror reported.
The process was expected to be completed during the tenure of former Health Minister Keheliya Rambukwella, he said, but was halted after disclosures before the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) about a proposal to buy used and inferior equipment rather than current technology. Successive health ministers took steps to revive the project, Dr. Sanjeewa said, but it stalled again.
Cobalt versus linear accelerators
Sri Lanka still leans heavily on cobalt-based radiation therapy, a method largely phased out elsewhere in favour of newer systems. Dr. Sanjeewa said cobalt treatment can cause significant side effects and that some specialists have grown reluctant to use it where better options exist.
Linear accelerators deliver radiation more precisely, reduce damage to surrounding healthy tissue and improve patients’ quality of life, he said.
The government has already approved new equipment for several hospitals that provide cancer treatment, according to Dr. Sanjeewa, but the process remains incomplete because officials and specialists cannot agree. Patients who cannot get treatment through the state system are pushed towards private institutions at costs that can run into hundreds of thousands of rupees.
He called for an investigation into whether private-sector interests or a “mafia” are behind the delay, and urged the government to settle the dispute and finish the procurement, warning that further delay could have serious consequences for patients who depend on the free health service.
A complaint the union has made before
The allegations are a sharpening of a case the same union has been pressing for months rather than a new disclosure. Dr. Sanjeewa told the Daily Mirror on June 5 that the delays had deprived patients of quality treatment and cost the country economically, and that the state would now have to spend several times what the equipment would have cost three years ago.
Speaking to The Sunday Morning in September 2025 — where he was identified as president of the Medical and Civil Rights Professional Association of Doctors — he set out two distinct bottlenecks: Treasury-funded upgrades to existing machines awaiting National Medicines Regulatory Authority approval, and an ADB loan for new machines at Karapitiya Teaching Hospital and elsewhere held up at ministry level, where he said the Technical Evaluation Committee’s biomedical engineers were neither approving tender documents nor meeting regularly to assess them.
The claims are the union’s and have not been independently verified. Neither the Health Ministry nor the officials referred to had responded publicly when this article was filed.
Pressure on cancer services
The complaint lands while state cancer services are already under visible strain. Patients at Apeksha Hospital in Maharagama wrote to the President and health authorities last week warning that a shortage of Neupogen was delaying chemotherapy, and the same union has said the drug is changing hands on the black market for more than Rs. 25,000 against a normal price of about Rs. 900.
Health procurement has been a recurring subject of investigation. Rambukwella was arrested by the Bribery Commission this month in a separate matter, and the CID has previously sought a Health Ministry probe into substandard cardiac stents.
Daily Mirror was the only verified newsroom carrying Tuesday’s statement when this article was filed.
