Super hospital will suck the health system dry
By Dr Werake Yu
Before everyone gets hyped up about the Pacific Medical Centre, let us get some facts right.
If I am correct, the PMC will be a private super-specialist centre and the four regional hospitals will be public hospitals.
Whose interests is Mathias Sapuri serving?
Why should patients from these regional hospitals be sent to this private hospital and who will foot the medical bill?
Dr Mathias Sapuri, as a former dean of the school of medicine and health sciences (SMHS), should be proactively supporting and promoting human resource development (pathologist, clinicians, radiologists, etc).
Currently, the SMHS is desperately in need of quality and qualified lecturers to help produce world class graduates. Is it difficult to inject funds into SMHS to create teaching positions for biomedical engineering lecturers and pathologists lectures and thus build up its status?
The chairman of the technical advisory committee on the PMC project should rightfully be the president of the PNG Medical Society, who represents the medical fraternity of the country.
Sapuri is no longer the president of the society. Prof Nakapi Tefuarani is the president of the PNG Medical Society.
Sapuri is a profit-oriented full time private practitioner.
Whose interest is he serving?
Is he really putting the people of PNG first before profits?
The Port Moresby General Hospital is the teaching hospital for the SMHS. PMGH should be completely upgraded into a state-of-the-art hospital using the K500 million. The students of SMHS and the public can then fully utilise the PMGH.
The concept of building a new medical centre and then linking it with human resource development is too shallow and tastes sour. The PMC will not drive the government’s Vision 2050 for PNG to become wise, healthy and happy. Instead it will do the opposite by sucking the health system dry, leaving the rural people unhealthy and unhappy.
I completely agree with your comments. Sapuri must not fool the government of PNG and the health minister must stop listening to him. He is no longer the President of the Medical Society.