Resh­ma Ra­goonath

South pri­vate hos­pi­tals say they stand ready to part­ner with the Health Min­istry to help re­duce the back­log of cas­es at the over-bur­dened pub­lic health in­sti­tu­tions.Yes­ter­day Dr Anirudh Ma­habir, di­rec­tor at Sur­gi-Med Clin­ic and Dr Ru­pert In­dar, CEO of South­ern Med­ical Clin­ic, both San Fer­nan­do based in­sti­tu­tions, wel­comed the ini­tia­tive since it will help ease the pres­sure on the pub­lic health sec­tor in­sti­tu­tions.On Wednes­day, Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan, speak­ing at the launch of the Ex­ter­nal Pa­tient Pro­gramme, an­nounced plans to part­ner with pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions to clear the back­log of surg­eries, CT scans, MRIs and oth­er health ser­vices.

Yes­ter­day the T&T Guardian con­tact­ed of­fi­cials at St Clair Med­ical, St Au­gus­tine Pri­vate Hos­pi­tal and West Shore Med­ical, as well as, Sur­gi-Med Clin­ic and South­ern Med­ical Clin­ic to gauge their re­spons­es to the pro­posed plan. How­ev­er, on­ly Ma­habir and In­dar were avail­able to com­ment.Both doc­tors agreed that Khan's plan would make a dif­fer­ence in de­liv­er­ing med­ical care to cit­i­zens.Ma­habir said Sur­gi-Med, a 36-bed hos­pi­tal, has all the ser­vices nec­es­sary to help ad­dress the de­lays and back­log in the pub­lic health sec­tor."If the gov­ern­ment ser­vice does not have the ca­pac­i­ty and if pri­vate ser­vice has the ca­pac­i­ty and the abil­i­ty then the cit­i­zen­ry de­serves the med­ical care that they need," he said.

In fact, Ma­habir said, "We do have ex­cess ca­pac­i­ty right now and we do wel­come the min­is­ter's ini­tia­tive."In­dar shared Ma­habir's views."Our work is al­ways com­ple­men­tary to the Min­istry of Health so we work with them very close­ly in every­thing and they have in­vit­ed our ser­vices in four or five dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories and we have re­spond­ed. It (the plan) will help. The de­mand out­strips the sup­ply in health and the pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions are as­sist­ing," said In­dar.

Po­si­tion Change

Iron­i­cal­ly, in 2012 Khan ad­mit­ted that it was too cost­ly to out­source med­ical pro­ce­dures. Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion on the Or­der Pa­per by In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Harold Ramkissoon in the Sen­ate said $164 mil­lion was spent by health au­thor­i­ties for out­sourc­ing ser­vices for the pe­ri­od 2009-2010.Khan, in a news­pa­per in­ter­view af­ter his state­ment said the ex­or­bi­tant fig­ures were the dri­ving force for him to stop all out­sourc­ing to pri­vate hos­pi­tals ex­cept with the au­thor­i­ty of the min­is­ter or the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO).Dur­ing that pe­ri­od, some pri­vate hos­pi­tals had raised con­cerns over de­lays in pay­ment for out­sourced ser­vices.