PMC not a cost effective project

IT was reported in the other daily that some callers to the FM100 talkback show expressed support for the building of the Pacific Medical Centre.
However, the most positive part of the report was the part where Dr Mathias Sapuri is reported to say that Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare had written to his committee advising them not to use existing funds for the project but seek alternative funding support to building the medical centre.
I can only hope the word is honoured and no public funds would be wasted on this project.
Now that we are all clear that the PMC will be built with alternative funds, one can consider the cost effectiveness of the project.
It will apparently cost more than K500 million and initially have 150 beds.
That comes in at about K1.6 million per bed!
Complex and sophisticated medical technology needs to be properly set up for multiple daily uses.
For example, it is not efficient to do one heart operation per fortnight as this would mean an incredible waste of resources that had to be set up afresh every fortnight.
Several years ago, the Royal Hobart Hospital in Tasmania closed down its heart operation unit because it was doing less than 300 heart operations per year.
The heart surgeons considered it not only a waste of money (in terms of economy of scale as mentioned above), but also dangerous in terms of the infrequency of the procedure for the teams involved in doing the procedures (blood bank, heart lung machine technicians, ICU staff, special anaesthesiology requirements, etc.)
Practice makes perfect and for doctors to do procedures well, they need to be doing them almost every day.
The same applies to other complex and sophisticated medical procedures like kidney transplants and radiotherapy.
So, if we set up a Pacific Medical Centre that can do these complex procedures they will not be working at top efficiency, the unit cost for each case will be way above what it would cost in an institution where the procedure was performed on a daily basis.
This means that we would be spending more money to achieve not so good outcomes.
If some alternative funding source really wants to spend money on helping Papua New Guineans with complex medical problems requiring specialised and sophisticated care, the most cost effective way of doing this would be to invest the K500 million at 10% giving K50 million per year available to send patients to Brisbane or Singapore for these treatments.
In the meantime, the health workers of PNG should focus on doing what we can do well in country to well serve the majority of people with every day and life-threatening medical, surgical and reproductive health problems.
The question that I would really like the supporters of the PMC to answer is why don’t they use the private hospital up the hill behind Port Moresby General Hospital which was built with MVIL money in 1990s?
This hospital also cost many millions of kina. And why was this beautiful private hospital never equipped and opened?
Today, it just sits there rotting away, an example of health planning folly at its worst.
But some do not want to even learn from past mistakes, it seems.

Prof Glen Mola
Head of Obstetrics & Gynaecology UPNG