DEAR HEALTH MINISTER

This is part of a letter was first published in the online portal Malaysiakini.

Dear Health Minister,

“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.”

“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 RM90,000 per day.”

“I wonder Mr Minister, how would you like to have a tumor growing in your rectum with no avenue of getting it removed?”

“Is it true that the state department of health owes SMC a total ofRM 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 RM500,00 per month?”

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

“Thank you for listening.”

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 leaders in Sabah take note of this plight and urged the Health Minister to take immediate measures to rectify this anomaly. We simply cannot wait for a major disaster.