Government hospitals and clinics to issue itemised receipts by next year

Star: MUAR: Government hospitals and clinics will issue itemised bills to patients to show the cost of treatment and medicine from next year.
“Although patients only pay RM1, they should know the cost of their treatment and medicine,” Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said.
He said he would submit the proposal for itemised bills to the Cabinet soon.
“After the Cabinet approves it, we will issue itemised bills to patients at hospitals as well as clinics.
“We want the people to know how much the Government is spending to subsidise medical treatment for them,” Liow said at the launch of the National Oral Health Clinical Information System (OHCIS) at Klinik Maharani here yesterday.
Liow said the Government had also provided huge subsidies in offering dental care.
The ministry, he said, wanted to reduce the waiting time for denture replacement from the present three to four months to two weeks.
One way to achieve this was to increase the number of dental technologists at dental clinics, he said, adding that in Muar, for example, there was only one dental technologist.
He said the ministry wanted water treatment plants in the states to carry out water fluoridation to reduce tooth decay among the people.
This, he said, was important to ensure healthy teeth.
On the OHCIS, he said the system was aimed at speeding up efforts in providing dental care services.
He said the target was to reduce the waiting time for patients seeking dental treatment at the clinics from two hours at present to 30 minutes.