Sapuri: Plan must be well guided

THE government must start planning on how to develop the health sector within the next 10 years, chairman of the technical advisory committee on the Pacific Medical Centre (PMC) Dr Mathias Sapuri said.
He said the government had a responsibility to provide quality health care through the implementation of the National Health Plan 2011-20.
Sapuri described the current health services as appalling, adding that the Health Department spent 75% on administration costs, which could be spent on health care instead.
“Specialist training for doctors stopped 20 years ago. We’ve not done anything to improve the specialist and tertiary services in the sector,” he said during the talkback show on FM100 this week on the PMC and four regional hospitals.
“We need to pump up the specialist training in PNG, provide specialist facility and bring back our local specialists from abroad.”
He said about 50,000 people die of cancer every year, 10,000 from heart complications and hundreds of thousands die of complications from infectious diseases.
Sapuri said the government needed to build a hospital that would cater for all these diseases and that it was vital for the government to reconsider and invest in the PMC.