It was announced on 1st November that George Kent had received a letter of award (LOA) to design and build a 150 bed Hospital in Tanjong Karang for RM 277.2 million, which is equivalent to RM1.848 million a bed. This hospital is expected to take 4 years to be completed by November 2020.
The new Tanjong Karang Hospital at best can be categorised as a “minor specialist service hospital” with a 150-bed medical and ward block and two operating theatres (OT) amongst other medical facilities and equipment.
Last year the 300 bed Shah Alam Hospital was completed after much delay at a total cost of RM550 million. This also worked out to RM1.83million a bed. The hospital is a secondary referral centre with 300 beds.
By comparison, the new 300 bed KPJ Kuching Specialist Hospital has all the latest modern medical facilities including orthopaedic and traumatology, cardiology and heart surgery, chemotherapy and radiation oncology as well as plastic surgery facilities. These are the services not available even in many tertiary referral state hospitals. Phase one of KPJ Kuching has 150 beds and only cost RM130 million to build. The cost per bed is only RM866,6663. It is less than half of the cost of building the Tanjong Karang Hospital and the Shah Alam Hospital.
I would like to ask the Health Minister to explain why the cost of building new government hospitals is so much higher than building the private hospitals. Why are we paying twice the amount for lesser equipped facilities?
The worst thing is that after paying so much more for the hospitals, many of them run into problems and fall behind in their completion schedules. Shah Alam Hospital was only completed after the first contractor was terminated. Parit Buntar Hospital project is also labelled “sick” and very much delayed.
With the 2017 budget allocation for new hospital slashed to RM177 million, we cannot be wasteful and hope to achieve an additional 100 hospital beds only at the cost of RM1.8 million per bed. Malaysia needs an extra 30,000 beds to meet the needs of the health of the nation with 30 million population. It will take this government 300 years to achieve that number at this rate. In fact many new hospitals are needed to replace decade old, or even century old hospitals with designs from another era. Some of them are just safety hazards and do not meet the modern safety requirements. The Sultan of Johor has requested the government to build a new hospital to replace the century old 1206-bed Sultanah Aminah Hospital.
The number of patients treated in government hospitals is expected to increase by 5% a year. Many old hospitals would collapse under this increased strains before the new ones are completed. When Pakatan Harapan wins the election and forms the government, we will increase the allocation for new hospitals and, more importantly, we will award the new hospital building projects through competitive tenders to rescue our health service.