By Tan Sri Dr Chua Soi Lek
ENTERING Desa Park City from Duke Highway, an imposing multi-storey private hospital is hard to miss. It serves as a community hospital for surrounding neighbourhoods.
Let’s be frank, when patient seek for private medical facility, they go in with certain expectations:
- Courteous and efficient services
- Competent doctors with impressive and long string of qualifications
- Good and well-trained supporting staffs
- State of art technology & equipment
- Value for money for treatment & services
Nevertheless, one should never judge a book by its cover, including a private hospital until you are a patient. That is the litmus test.
I want to share with you an unfortunate patient about her disappointing experience in this particular hospital.
On July 4, a 74 years old female patient had a laceration on her left middle finger from doing kitchen chores. As a result, she suffers profuse bleeding. Fortunately, patient is a retired trained staff nurse. With the help from her husband, who’s a retired doctor, they immediately clean, disinfect the wound, followed by dressing and went straight to the hospital.
She then arrived at the hospital at 12.20pm and subsequently attended to at the Emergency Room by the doctor on call. The patient was left seated upright with the injured and bleeding finger hanging in the air. Common medical practice is to let the patient lie on the bed to reduce the risk of fainting.
Unbelievably, the emergency trolley is not properly equipped. The nurse in attendance was running around looking for Eusol and hydrogen peroxide. Meanwhile, the attending doctor makes some phone calls purportedly to consult a hand surgeon on call. He was then asked to proceed with further treatment, suturing and dressing.
The patient required eight stiches that took nearly 50 minutes. Meanwhile, the patient was anxious, fearful and in pain during this period. Then came the anti-tetanus injection. The nurse cleaned the injection site “A” on her arm with alcohol swab, but the injection was performed on uncleaned site “B”, and put a bandage on unrelated site “C”.
The injected site is now obviously inflamed, infected and swollen. Worried about complication, patient went to another private hospital the next day to have injured finger re-examined, changed dressing, at the same time seek treatment for her swollen injection site.
I share this with my friends that private hospitals can sometimes not only burn your pocket but give you a bitter memory that you regret the visit. I will continue sharing about the patient’s medical journey in my next post and how the customer service from this particular private hospital treats her complaint. – July 8, 2021
Tan Sri Dr Chua Soi Lek is the former Health Minister and former MCA President.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
Photo credit: Curtseyes/Alamy Stock Photo
