State hospitals cry for help

Regional and general hospitals across the country have made a plea for help from the Public Health Ministry, claiming their staff is overworked and working in fear of lawsuits while they have insufficient funds to pay reasonable salaries, develop infrastructure or buy new equipment.

Regional and General Hospitals Society of Thailand chairman Veerapong Pengwanich said the problems, which had a direct affect on the quality of health services, were raised at a meeting of hospital directors on Monday.

He said state hospitals across the country were facing workload problems because of an imbalance between the number of medical workers and the number of patients.

Over the past few years, the number of patients - especially inpatients - had increased dramatically, while the number of medical workers, including doctors and nurses, remained static. Nurses must now work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while doctors have to work every other day.

Veerapong said regional and general hospitals also lacked medical specialists to provide specific treatments to patients.

"The present situation is a lack of not only beds, but also medical workers to provide patient care. Some nurses cannot shoulder the workload and resign from state hospitals to work at private hospitals instead," he said.

Most medical workers in state hospitals receive low incomes from the government, even though they work outside of official working hours, he said. The society wants the Public Health Ministry to add special payments to monthly salaries, in accordance with workloads and the quality of work. It believes this will help to keep medical workers in the state health system.

However, even if the ministry increases monthly salaries for medical workers, they still face the spectre of medicalmalpractice lawsuits.

"Patients have high expectations for treatment [at state hospitals] and get more rights to access healthcare services, while [because of the additional workload] doctors have only three minutes to check each patient. If medical workers do anything wrong, patients can easily file a lawsuit with the courts," Veerapong said.

He urged the government to give the green light for its Bt100billion megaproject related to healthinfrastructure development.

He said regional and general hospitals across country lacked money to develop their infrastructure, which affected their healthcare services. They were unable to extend buildings to accommodate more patients and could neither purchase new medical equipment nor maintain the old.