The Government has said it is working on strategies to save King Faisal Hospital from losses and make its medical business profitable.
Proposed strategies include ensuring that the hospital focuses on advanced medical services such as kidney transplant, and expanding its patient accommodation capacity.
Officials from the Ministry of Health made the observations on Friday, September 23, while appearing before the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to respond to public asset management issues raised by the Auditor General’s report for the financial year 2020-2021.
Citing the AG’s report, PAC Chairperson, Valens Muhakwa, said King Faisal Hospital continues to incur losses [as its expenses outweigh its revenues]. He indicated that the hospital incurred a loss of Rwf1.5 billion in December last year (2021), while the total losses accrued over time amount to Rwf10 billion so far.
Responding to the issue, Dr. Corneille Killy Ntihabose, Head of Clinical and Public Health Services Department at the Ministry of Health, told PAC members that there are strategies to ensure that King Faisal offers medical services in a way that brings it profit, one of them being the focus on super-specialty (advanced) medical services.
He indicated that Rwanda has started embarking on advanced heart treatment, as well as kidney transplant, adding that there are doctors who are being trained in this regard in order to have skilled personnel.
"We will introduce kidney transplant [at King Faisal Hospital] in the coming days, which was also one of the services that our patients were seeking abroad,” he said.
"Those particular [medical] services that can even attract people from the region, such as from Burundi, [DR] Congo and elsewhere, are the ones they [King Faisal Hospital] should concentrate on, instead of being in competition with other hospitals,” he observed.
MP Jeanne d’Arc Uwimanimpaye commended the ideas to upgrade King Faisal Hospital, especially the specialisation aspect, but stressed that skilling the hospital’s medical personnel is also key to achieving quality healthcare and productivity.
"Trainings for King Faisal [Hospital] should be given priority, because even though we introduce kidney transplants and procure good medical machines, without having the doctors like those that people follow abroad, it would also be a problem,” she said.
Currently, Ntihabose said the expansion for the capacity of out-care cases (for outpatients) at the hospital has been done, to increase their consultation capacity and treatment capacity.
So far, he indicated that King Faisal has 160 beds (a capacity to accommodate 160 inpatients), which he said are very few.
He told members of Parliament that there is a project to expand the hospital’s facilities so as to increase its accommodation capacity.
The proposed plan would add an estimated 480 more beds to the hospital’s capacity. But, he explained that a feasibility study on the expansion of the hospital facilities, which is underway and expected to be completed in March 2023, will indicate the cost for the project, its time frame, and the final number of beds.
"We want the facilities to be set in the expansion plan to accommodate the super-specialty [medical] services, such as kidney transplant and [advanced] surgery,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ntihabose said that there is an agreement between King Faisal Hospital, the Ministry of Health, Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB), and high-level hospitals in the country including CHUK, CHUB, and the Rwanda Military Hospital to ease the transfer of patients to this health facility for advanced treatment.
"For instance, if a doctor from a given hospital realises that a patient suffers from a heart condition, they can directly transfer them to King Faisal Hospital, without having to first transfer them to CHUK; yet the medical bill is based on CHUK tariff,” he said, indicating that treating many patients could help make more money.