Dear Health Minister

Original title "Health Minister, you owe Sabah answers" reproduced from MalaysiaKini.com. New Sabah Times added: "EDITOR’S NOTE : This letter was first published in the online portal Malaysiakini by a Concerned Citizen and reproduced in the New Sabah Times as this is an issue that concerns every Malaysian in Sabah. It is hoped that MCA leaders in Sabah,in particular Datuk Edward Khoo,take note of this plight and urged his fellow MCA leader,who is the Health Minister,to take immediate measures to rectify this anomaly. We simply cannot wait for a major disaster." On further check, the original letter is from Product of The System's blogspot titled "Open Letter to the Minister of Health." dated Feb 21, 2009.

Health Minister, you owe Sabah answers

Dear Health Minister,

Ali, a 32-year-old road traffic accident victim, travelled three hours from a district in Sabah and arrived in Kota Kinabalu six hours after the initial trauma. After the initial assessment in the emergency department, a CT scan of the head and abdomen was ordered to exclude intracranial bleeding and intraabdominal injury.

He was whisked back onto an ambulance to the privately-owned Sabah Medical Center (SMC) for the required scans. After the ten-minute procedure, he was repacked into the ambulance back to Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) to undergo further assessment while awaiting the results of his blood tests and X-rays. His scans and X-rays were reviewed.

Ali was found to have a lacerated liver and a fractured long bone with multiple superficial wounds. He was then prepared for emergency surgery.

For that, the young man was then re-wheeled into the ambulance and headed once again to the SMC where the operating theatre and intensive care unit of QEH are currently housed. By the time surgery starts, it was already nine hours from the time of his motor vehicle accident.

My story hasn’t finished, Mr Minister.

One hour into the operation, our young chap bled tremendously that he required more blood products to sustain life. It would not be another hour or so before the blood products arrive from the blood bank of QEH to the SMC.

You see YB, blood has to be taken from the patient and passed to a house officer. The house officer will fill in the necessary forms and hand them over to an attendant. The attendant will wait for a chartered bus or ambulance to head back to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital or rather, what remains of it.

Back in QEH, the attendant will wait 45 minutes for the blood to be cross-matched and then wait a while more for the arrival of a chartered bus or ambulance to ferry him (or her) back to SMC.

Anyway, being a fit and healthy young man previously, Ali survived the operation. He was admitted to the ICU and needed a repeated chest X-ray.

For that, the radiography team in QEH is informed. The duo will then take a the chartered bus or ambulance to SMC to perform the X-ray. Shooting an X-ray takes all but two minutes. Processing the cassette will take another five.

However, the processing is done back in the hospital and delivered by the next available ambulance back to SMC. By the time the X-ray films reach the patient, it could be anything from three to twelve hours later.

Dear Yang Berkhidmat (YB) Liow,

I hope you notice the unacceptable predicament our Sabahan patients (and medical staff) are facing currently. It is already six months since the initial and abrupt closure of Kota Kinabalu’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Since then, we have been without a proper operating theatre and intensive care unit.

We are also without distinctive wards for many of our surgical patients of most disciplines. Frankly speaking, the health crisis of the state of Sabah has run so deep and so far along that I do not where to begin.

I will instead serve an eye-opening fact to you, Mr. Liow. At the height of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) epidemic, the the communist government of the People’s Republic of China erected a 1,000-bed hospital within seven days.

Work on the Xiaotangshan Hospital started on April 24, 2003 and was completed on April 30, with 7,000 workers and 500 machines tirelessly on duty around the clock. Far from being a melamine-laced structure, the Xiaotangshan Hospital is equipped with the then state-of-the-art anti-infective measures and facilities.

The structure built within a week is still standing firm six years later today, ready to house any ill and potentially infective patient in the event of any unforeseen health crisis.

Mr Health Minister,

That is exactly what Sabahans are in right now – a health crisis. The Barisan Nasional government chants ‘Malaysia Boleh’ like some proverbial battle-cry but the Sabah state health crisis has proven that empty vessels make the most noise.

Unlike MCA members, not everyone enjoys being labeled a ‘squatter’. For six months, the medical staff and patients of Sabah have been housed in sections of the Sabah Medical Center paying a whooping rental of RM 90,000 per day.

For five months since our forced relocation into your prized SMC, we only had one operating room for life-threatening emergency cases. Elective surgeries were postponed indefinitely even those involving cancers and prostates and suspicious breast lumps.

We only restarted elective surgeries a month ago but even so, the backlog of cases is tremendous and catastrophic. I wonder Mr Minister, how would you like to have a tumor growing in your rectum with no avenue of getting it removed?

That is exactly what our poor Sabah folk are facing. They were without money and without a hospital to get operated in. In fact, they still don’t because they do not have a formal general hospital for Kota Kinabalu anymore.

Heck, we don’t even have our own CT scan. What we do have, however, is lots of bills to pay and debts to settle.

Is it true that the state department of health owes SMC a total of RM 6.1 million for CT scan services? Is it true that Hantaran Wira, the company contracted to provide transport to and fro SMC-QEH is paid RM500,000 per month?

Mr. Minister,

You owe the 3.4 million population of Sabah a lot of answers for wasted lives and needless deaths. Money cannot solve all problems in life. Thank you for listening.

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KY: While I might agree to most of the content above, I think political, emotional outburst and non-objectivity should be left out. For example: "Unlike MCA members, not everyone enjoys being labeled a ‘squatter’." The author of the letter is almost clearly anti-MCA/BN or at least a disappointed MCA member. If I am to take him/her out of context, I will certainly say s/he claims MCA members enjoy being labeled squatters (penghuni setinggan?) which is a blatant lie/false presumption!