Shot in arm for hospitals

NST: Indonesian businesswoman Jas came here to be by her husband Anton’s bedside as doctors treat him for injuries from a fall.
In between visits to Southern Hospital, the 55-year- old woman has squeezed in shopping and sightseeing, with her daughter Febby and brother-in-law Azril Idrus.
"We’ve been here a week, and luckily we know Malacca well so we can do some shopping and sightseeing," she said.
Indonesians like Anton are the mainstay of Malacca’s health tourism sector, believing doctors here offer them better services.
For Southern Hospital and Pantai Medical Centre Malacca, two of the State’s private hospitals, foreigners comprised about a third of their patients last year.
Of these 7,000 foreign patients, a majority were affluent Indonesians.
That may change in the future.
On Friday, the Government announced that it would set up a unit to boost Malaysia as a destination for medical tourism.
Malacca and Penang are the country’s two main centres. Their biggest rival is Singapore, which two years ago launched Singapore Medicine, which aims to attract one million foreign patients a year by 2012.
A one-stop agency to make healthcare facilities more accessible to foreigners was exactly what Malaysia’s health tourism sector needed, said Dr G. Jayakumar, chairman of the Malaysian Medical Association’s Mal- acca chapter. "We are competing with neighbouring countries where medical tourism is also being aggressively marketed," he said.
The move is "an important means for generating income especially for Malacca and Penang because of our proximity to Sumatra", said Radhuana Salleh, chief executive officer of the Southern Hospital.
"There is a lot of potential that we have not tapped into.
"There’s a lack of co-ordination among agencies when it comes to promoting health tourism," said Cliff Gan, marketing and public relations manager of Pantai Medical Centre Malacca.
Jas said the unit would help families like hers with listing hospitals for patients from abroad.
"Maybe we can find a list of specialists available in various hospitals, compare prices, and even request for travel information via this unit."
It could also provide information on accommodation and even places of interest which patients or family members could visit as part of a treatment-cum-holiday package, she said.
Medical tourists from Europe and the US are likely to be drawn by the shorter waiting times for treatment and surgery, said Pantai’s Gan.
And, of course, healthcare here cost half of what it would cost them at home, he added.
Malaysian-style healthcare has advantages that go beyond just cost which are worth promoting, according to Canadian couple Normand Laurin, 57, and Ursula Oberli, 53.
The couple, from Quebec, had only meant to holiday here, en route from Indonesia to Thailand.
When Laurin had chest pains on their first day here, doctors at the Mahkota Medical Centre told him three arteries were blocked, and he needed surgery.
"I received good treatment," he said. Oberli, a former nurse herself, stayed by her husband’s side every night after his triple heart bypass.