Fees rocket

 By PETER ESOP WARI

PEOPLE seeking treatment for knife and bullet wounds from tribal fights will be charged K1,000, the management of the Mendi General Hospital in Southern Highlands says.

Hospital chief executive officer Joseph Turian said this was to discourage people from engaging in tribal conflicts and using up the hospital resources when they were injured. The hospital presently charges K50 to treat people injured in such fights.

“This is to make sure people do away with tribal fights,” he said.

“The hospital is sometimes filled with patients with wounds as the result of tribal fights. 

“Once the high fees are charged, they will feel the pinch and do away with it (fighting).”

Turian said the hospital at times spent too much time treating people injured in these fights and less on accident victims or those suffering from illnesses which needed their attention.

“The hospital will be doing this to make sure those people who like to be involved in tribal fights refrain from it. Tribal fights must stop,” he said.

Meanwhile, the hospital has no funds for outreach programmes into rural areas of the province.

Turian said the outreach programme was important so that doctors could go out to the rural areas and attend to sick people.

He said MPs from the province and the provincial government needed 

to look into the problem and make funds available.

He said the hospital could not allocate extra funds for the outreach programme because the K1.2 million received annually from the national government was being used to pay workers and about K70, 000 for maintenance.

He said the Mineral Resource Development Corporation  donated a new vehicle for the outreach programme and also a 400 KVA generator set last month.