Patients can have heart surgery in own provinces
Within the next few years, the line of patients waiting to undergo heart surgery in Bangkok will be much shorter as people from the provinces will no longer be coming to the capital for treatment, the Public Health Ministry vowed yesterday.
Until December next year, a new project will refer those patients coming from the North and the Northeast back to the regions for "equal quality" treatment, said Dr Sa-nguan Nitayarumphong, head of the National Health Security Office (NHSO). The ministry, in association with the NHSO, yesterday launched a project to perform 8,000 heart operations in the next 15 months. Usually, the total number of heart operations done countrywide per year is about 6,000. Under this project, in which more than 40 large hospitals across the country will be linked and will jointly manage patients, a far higher number of operations could be performed, said Sa-nguan. The NHSO, which is responsible for most of the population, has set aside Bt776 million for the project. Before the launch, the NHSO piloted the project in all 19 provinces in the Northeast for about six months and saw a high level of success, said Sa-nguan. The average time a patient had to wait for surgery in the Northeast used to be about one to two years, yet this had shortened to about half after piloting the project. When sharing a database of heart-surgery capacities and managing the patients together, as well as improving the capacity of smaller hospitals, the treatment improved dramatically, he said.
Arthit Khwankhom The Nation Chiang Mai
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