"Nobody should be deprived of the best facilities", deputy Health Minister instructs director investigate HKL old maternity ward conditions asap
SHAH ALAM - Health Ministry will investigate the conditions and status of Kuala Lumpur Hospital's old maternity ward immediately following an “open letter” Instagram post shared by a Covid-19 quarantine patient.
Deputy Health Minister Datuk Dr Noor Azmi Ghazali said the hospital director has been asked to take drastic action.
“We will investigate this case urgently and take fast action,” he told Sinar Daily.
Dr Noor Azmi said nobody should be deprived of the best facilities the Malaysian government and Health Ministry could offer.
The Instagram user, named Alia Nordin, stated that she and her two-month-old baby was instructed to quarantine at the hospital as they had Covid-19 symptoms. She expressed her sadness and disappointment about the conditions of the hospital ward, describing it as “the first eight hours of horror”.
Alia told Sinar Daily that other mothers who had been quarantined there before this and discharged as well as those currently quarantined in the facility shared their experiences with her via direct message.
In her posting, she said she arrived at the hospital at 9pm and felt a sense of uneasiness seeing the condition of the place.
She said it was too scared that she didn’t even dare go to the bathroom until the next morning at dawn.
She stated that there was no clean and suitable sink for mothers to clean their breast pump equipment and bathe their newborn babies, adding that the fridge provided was not in the best condition making her question whether or not it was safe to store her expressed breast milk.
The mother-of-three also said there was no specified space for mothers to breastfeed their babies or pump, leaving them to do it out in the open infront of other Covid-19 patients.
The mother, however, emphasised that all the doctors and nurses are kind and extremely helpful.
“My complaint here is purely about the hospital facilities. I hope YB could come down here yourself and look, think and wonder would you let your wife, siblings, or family members quarantine here in such a condition?
“I am still here and I can bring you for a tour if you are willing,” she wrote, addressed to Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin and Health Director-General Tan Sri Noor Hisham Abdullah.
Alia said she was not demanding first-class service and did not even mind being quarantined in a government facility but it should at least be well equipped and clean for mothers and their newborn babies to stay in.
The post was created on March 31 and has since garnered 8,117 likes.
In a more recent post, she uploaded a conversation with another patient in the ward stating that the bathroom facilities had been cleaned and the shower had been repaired after a post dubbing “akak OCD” (female with the obsessive-compulsive disorder) had made noise about the conditions.
