APHM to facilitate sharing of resources in treating COVID-19 patients, accelerating vaccination

KUALA LUMPUR: The Association of Private Hospitals Malaysia (APHM) will facilitate sharing of resources, namely human resource and movable infrastructure such as medical equipment or devices if required for treating COVID-19 patients and to enhance the vaccination rate at mega vaccination centres in the next few weeks.

APHM president Datuk Dr Kuljit Singh in a statement today said chief operating officers of private hospitals in Klang Valley will be in direct discussion with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to have the maximum support rendered to the patients in the country.

"As of today, almost 100 per cent of the designated COVID-19 ICU beds in private hospitals are taken up by COVID-19 Category 5 patients.

"We are in further discussion with MOH to decant Emergency Case and In-Patients in government hospitals to private centres so that more public hospitals can be converted into COVID-19 hospitals to accommodate a few thousand more patients," he said.

Dr Kuljit also said that vaccination of private healthcare workers had proven to protect the frontliners from COVID-19, the outcome is consistent with data provided by the government on their healthcare workers and it is comparatively the same with international figures.

He said that according to the 152 APHM members, it was reported that most of the vaccinated healthcare workers had not been infected with COVID-19 but those small numbers infected had very mild symptoms and recovered very well.

"This is a testimony that vaccination will be our main preventive tool to get this pandemic under control as we have noticed that the current increased usage of ICU beds and high death rate is because of inadequate number of vaccines in the country in the first six months of the year.

"We had this problem because of world shortage of vaccines and slow delivery of vaccines to certain parts of the world including Malaysia," he said.

-- BERNAMA