The Malaysian Insight

HOSPITALS will continue to treat cases that require urgent surgery, the Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) had given its assurance, even as the Ministry of Health (MOH) called for elective procedures to be postponed to free up hospital beds for the treatment of Covid-19 patients.

Its president Dr M. Subramaniam told The Malaysian Insight procedures for life and death cases will not be postponed and only those that do not immediately harm the life of the patient will be placed on waiting lists.

“Elective surgeries have been postponed, and I think it’s advisable to postpone at this moment because we need the beds. We need the manpower to look after our Covid patients, which is spreading like wildfire,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

“Now what type of cases get postponed? These are the ones that are not urgent, they don’t have to be done today. There are a lot of surgeries that we do today that can be done a year later. We do them today, only because we are free to do so, only because we have space to do.

“For example, you want to look at cases like thyroid swelling in the neck. This is not urgent unless it is cancer or something that is giving rise to it.

“Or say you have a lump in the breast. Then yes, we would want to operate on it because it’s likely to be cancer. It must be proven that the case is urgent,” Dr Subramaniam said.

Earlier this week, Health Director-General Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said elective procedures in hospitals in the Klang Valley should be reduced or postponed to free up hospital beds for Covid-19 patients.

Malaysia is facing a surge in coronavirus infections with over 4,000 new daily cases reported in recent days. The country is also under a nationwide movement-control order that bans interstate and inter-district travel, social gatherings and dine-ins at restaurants.

Dr Subramaniam said he agrees with the call to postpone elective procedures as MOH needs more manpower to deal with the pandemic.

He agreed that public hospitals currently have no space to proceed with elective surgeries.

Dr Subramaniam, however, pointed out that this was an internationally accepted move in medical practice and was nothing new, with patients in some countries sometimes waiting for more than a year to have such operations.

“When we are in dire need of manpower, facilities and space, it is important that we postpone elective cases and do the emergencies first and manage Covid-19 more than anything else,” he said.

MMA did not have figures or any data on patients on waiting lists for elective procedures, he added.

Private hospitals, however, have more room to continue with such procedures as they are not as involved in Covid-19 management, although public hospitals have begun decanting certain non-Covid-19 cases to private hospitals.

“The public hospitals are the ones that need to decide on everything. For some reason, MOH wants to hold everything by itself for which only they know the reason.

“In the private sector, many of the hospitals are being under-utilised, or not utilised at all. The logic of that one, only the MOH can explain,” he said.

Yesterday, the Association of Private Hospitals Malaysia (APHM) told The Malaysian Insight that MOH must not further delay referring non-Covid-19 patients to private hospitals for elective procedures.

APHM president Dr Kuljit Singh said this would reduce the burden of public hospitals, which are currently overwhelmed with cases of Covid-19 patients as infections surge nationwide.

Kuljit said government hospitals could outsource the treatment of non-Covid-19 patients to private hospitals, which will take on the cases on the condition that they are referred by a doctor in a public hospital and funded by the government.

He said the government hospitals had been slow to take up the offer from the private healthcare sector, which had seen only a small number of referrals.

Some of the cases referred were patients who had waited nearly a year for treatment, he said.

Dr Kuljit said while private hospitals had limitations, they currently have the capacity to assist the government in handling non-Covid-19 cases.

But while private hospitals still had the capacity to treat non-Covid-19 patients, he said the beds designated for Covid-19 patients were fully taken up.

There are 31 private hospitals in the Klang Valley admitting Covid-19 patients, but the number of beds allocated for coronavirus care at each hospital is based on its individual capacity. – May 18, 2021.