HÀ NỘI —
Health minister Nguyễn Thị Kim Tiến has asked central and local medical
facilities nationwide to review hospital services offered by private
organisations and individuals.
Accordingly,
hospitals must punish and terminate contracts with organisations and
individuals offering hospital services that cause annoyance to patients as well
as affect the quality of medical examination and treatment.
The order
comes in the wake of some cases reported recently in which medical facilities
chose service providers and gave them certain privileges.
The
services, such as those providing security guards, patient transport, canteen
services and solid medical waste treatment, besides dead body preservation and
funeral organisation, reportedly affected the prestige of doctors and
hospitals.
The
Health Minister ordered the issue of open public bids for these services as per
regulations, and asked health facilities to select service providers that
maintain quality and charge reasonable prices.
The rates
of these services must also be publicised for the knowledge of patients,
relatives of patients and medical staff.
Hospitals
must also work with patient transport providers to set up operation
regulations, ensuring transparency, and strictly punish those who force
patients to use their services.
In
addition, hospitals need to train and improve the communication and behaviour
skills of hospital staff towards patients and their family members.
A
hospital unit should be assigned the job of monitoring the services and of
strictly punishing those who trouble patients.
Heads of
medical units must take the responsibility for any violation that might hurt
the legal benefits of patients, and must report the list of services being
provided at their facilities to the Health Ministry.
Earlier,
the ministry had asked the Hà Nội-based Paediatrics Hospital to quickly send a
report regarding a case in which the hospital’s security guards prevented an
ambulance from leaving the premises, as reported in the media and on social
networks recently.
The
security guards of the hospital had prevented an ambulance from leaving the
hospital on July 3, even though it was carrying a nine-month-old heart patient.
The
patient’s family members had asked the hospital to send the baby home because
he was not expected to survive after undergoing surgery last month.
The
baby’s family rented an ambulance from the central Nghệ An Province to bring
him back from Hà Nội. The baby has died, newspapers report.
Last
week, Lê Thanh Hải, the hospital’s director, apologised to the Vietnamese
people for having allowed the incident to occur, and said the three security
guards had been dismissed.
VNS
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