Chief Surgeon at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital (CWMH), Dr Josese Turagava says over 100,000 Fijians go through patient care at the facility annually and more than 10,000 operations are performed.
While speaking at the Medivisor Musical evening at the Kshatriya Hall in Suva yesterday, Dr Turagava said even with the struggles the Government had to go through with COVID-19 in the last two years, they were still able to look after patients and send those that needed treatment in India.
“We’re so thankful for the network and setup that we can actually do with Indian hospitals, particularly Max Health Care in India to help in referring to most of our cases.”
“Particularly for the Ministry of Health, we’ve been sending patients for radiation therapy for joint replacements and particularly for cardiac surgery. That has been one of the key areas of specialist areas that are still not available in the country.”
“As a general surgeon, I’ve been at the end of the food chain in CWM hospital, receiving patients coming back from India and particularly from the mess hospitals because we’re thankful that even though health care within the Government system has been limited, but the private insurance company has increased up to around 9.6% per cent according to the last census.”
Dr Turagava further highlighted that Non-Communicable Diseases have been a big problem in the country and the bulk of work the Ministry has done is to look after all the complications and problems of NCDs.
“But healthcare in Fiji is only limited to what we can do but with a network of Australia, New Zealand and India, we were able to refer for more specialised care that is not available locally.”
“A lot more private insurance has been available for people locally and for company groups like FRCA, Fiji Police, RFMF and they are subsidising the work so we can actually look after people who they can send privately to India and the Government can actually look after the other bit that they cannot.”
“Traditionally, we’ve been sending patients to Australia and New Zealand because they are our close neighbors, but we heard the price in India is fractionally a lot cheaper and that’s the reason why there’s a lot more diversion to actually send cases off to India.”
He added for breast cancer, CWM does chemotherapy, surgery and then patients are sent to India for radiation therapy and treatment that is not available locally.
