Follow guidelines before travelling abroad for treatment, Ministry of Health tells Omanis

Oman Tuesday 31/May/2016 22:49 PM
By: Times News Service
Follow guidelines before travelling abroad for treatment, Ministry of Health tells Omanis

Muscat: Citizens who travel abroad for treatment have been advised to take into account their ‘health conditions’ before making the journey and avoid hospitals who focus only on raking in profits.
The Ministry of Health (MOH) has also appealed to such people contact the Department of Treatment Abroad to identify specialised and accredited hospitals.
In a statement the ministry has said that it is keen to provide the health services to citizens in its various institutions.
Citizens who travel abroad for treatment at their own expenses need to be fully aware of their health condition before travelling. Some of these cases has no treatment abroad, while treatment of most of these cases is available in the Sultanate, the statement said.
In addition, some patients have complications while they are receiving treatment abroad, this resulted to admit them in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Accordingly, they demand the Ministry to cover the expenses in order to return to the country, it added.
Advising citizens to contact the Department of Treatment Abroad to identify specialised and accredited hospitals, it also warned citizens not to deal with the hospitals whose only aim is profit.
“The ministry does not recommend the elderly who cannot bear travelling or who are suffering from some chronic diseases and require a long period of time for treatment like cancers to travel abroad for treatment,” it said
Patients often inform that no successful treatment is available and in some cases, the treatment abroad is completely the same as the treatment in the health institutions in the Sultanate, it added.
The Department of Treatment Abroad revealed that the number of cases that have been brought back from Thailand in 2015 is reached (10) cases. While, from India it reached in 2015 (47) cases. In 2014, the number of brought back cases is reached to (36) cases.
Recently, the Ministry has faced many difficulties and spent large sums of money to bring back the critically ill patients that need a medical staff from abroad along with assistive devices, as well as cases in which patients being treated abroad died.
The health care system in the Sultanate consists of three integrated levels; the primary, the secondary and the tertiary level.
The primary health care level is the effective and high quality level provided by the health centers, polyclinics and hospitals that cover all the areas in the Sultanate.
The secondary health care level is provided by the referral hospitals in the Governorates, as well as the hospitals in the Wilayats.
The tertiary health care level is the high-tech specialised health care services provided by hospitals like; Royal, Khawla and Al-Nahda. Ibn Sina Hospital is also a tertiary health care specialised hospital.
At present, number of hospitals in the Sultanate has reached 70 and 49 of them are affiliated to the Ministry of Health.
The number of beds in all these hospitals stands at 6,468, which works out to 15.6 beds per 10,000 people. Of these, 4,998 beds or 77 per cent are affiliated to the Ministry’s hospitals.