Some non-Covid-19 cases referred to private hospitals, lower rate charged
CORONAVIRUS | In light of the Covid-19 outbreak, the Health Ministry has begun referring some public hospital patients with other conditions to private medical facilities.
These private centres are charging the government a lower rate than usual, said the ministry’s director-general, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah...
CORONAVIRUS | In light of the Covid-19 outbreak, the Health Ministry has begun referring some public hospital patients with other conditions to private medical facilities.
These private centres are charging the government a lower rate than usual, said ministry’s director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.
“We have been given (permission) by the government that we can buy services (and) send non-Covid-19 patients to private hospitals.
“But we have negotiated the pricing, it is not normal pricing that is given to the ministry,” he said during the ministry’s daily Covid-19 briefing today.
Non-Covid-19 patients are also being referred to district hospitals for surgeries and university hospitals for semi-emergencies.
The ministry has designated 40 hospitals across the country to treat Covid-19 while seven exclusively treat those with the disease.
Patients can be screened at 71 hospitals.
Asked about the recovery rate of those warded in ICU, Noor Hisham said that the rate was between “40 to 50 percent”.
Malaysia registered 121 recoveries as of 12noon today, bringing the total number of discharged patients to 1,608.
As of 12 noon today, 109 new cases were recorded, bringing the tally to 4,228. Of the total, 72 are being treated in ICU.
Malaysian hospitals presently administer anti-retroviral HIV drugs and antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine on an off-label basis on Covid-19 patients.
Today, Noor Hisham explained that the drugs are only used in severe cases with close attention paid to the side effects.
“The side effects of hydroxychloroquine include headaches, blurred vision, muscle tenderness and sometimes gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhoea,” he said.
Quest for better antigen test kit
He also shared that the ministry remains on the lookout for a reliable antigen rapid test kit after previous imported kits missed the mark.
“None have shown promising reliability as well as accuracy so we will continue (to search),” he said.
The ministry presently uses a RT-PCR test to determine if a patient has Covid-19 but Noor Hisham has repeatedly lamented the time taken for laboratories to process samples.
Such tests take more than 24 hours and have caused a backlog in samples with pending results.
An antigen rapid test kit, however, can deliver results at point-of-care within two hours.
Since the outbreak began, he said Malaysia had taken samples from a total of 69,675 people while the maximum number of tests that can be done per day is 11,500.
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