The Super Specialised Hospital of the Bangladesh Medical University (BMU) is set to be run as a corporate entity, and its treatment costs will be higher than those of government or autonomous hospitals, officials said.
To facilitate the move, the cabinet has approved an amendment to the existing BMU law. The amendment is likely to be placed before the parliament during this ongoing session, they said.
The corporate model is necessary to ensure administrative and financial autonomy, allowing the hospital to attract highly qualified doctors with competitive salaries, said BMU officials.
“It would be run under the company act once the amendment of the act is passed in the parliament,” Prof Abul Kalam Azad, pro vice chancellor (administration) of BMU, told The Daily Star yesterday.
The decisions on the hospital’s mode of operation and manpower recruitment should have been taken much earlier, said Prof Syed Abdul Hamid of the Institute of Health Economics at the University of Dhaka.
“Were those decisions made earlier, the facility would not have remained non-functional for such a long time,” he told this correspondent yesterday.
The 750-bed hospital, established under a Tk 1,868 crore project, was inaugurated in September 2022. However, no dedicated workforce has been appointed so far, and limited services are being provided using BMU’s existing staff and budget.
Running the hospital under a private company model is likely to help prevent middle-class patients from going abroad for treatment, but the government should introduce a package and give a subsidy for low-income people so that they, too, can access treatment there, Prof Hamid said.
Aimed at offering world-class healthcare and reducing the need for Bangladeshis to seek treatment abroad, the hospital has five specialised centres: the Cardio and Cerebrovascular Centre, the Hepatobiliary and Liver Transplant Centre, the Mother and Child Healthcare Centre, the Kidney Disease and Urology Centre, and the Accident and Emergency Centre.
The recruitment process during the Awami League tenure was halted over allegations of corruption. An attempt was made to recruit manpower during the interim government, but it failed.
Many highly sophisticated procedures, such as kidney transplants, are supposed to be conducted at the facility, requiring highly skilled personnel.
Getting such manpower is not possible if they are offered salaries under the existing pay structure, said Prof Azad.
“In this given situation, a decision has been taken to amend the existing law,” he said, adding that they have taken the opinion from the law minister.
The cabinet on June 4 approved an amendment to the BMU Act incorporating provisions that allow the university to form for-profit or not-for-profit companies or organisations, as well as acquire shares in such entities.
“This will be a private limited company, with the university holding a 90 percent stake and the government owning the remaining 10 percent,” said a top university official requesting anonymity.
Under the new arrangement, all recruitment will be made on a contractual basis through headhunting, expressions of interest and competitive examinations, instead of permanent government appointments, he said.
The official said the existing university framework was too bureaucratic to run a world-class specialised hospital, as financial and administrative decisions often had to pass through multiple layers of approval.
Asked whether treatment costs would rise, he said: “It is natural that costs will be higher. If you pay a doctor Tk 10 lakh, the income has to come from somewhere.”
Replying to the same question, Prof Azad said the hospital would have to compete with top-tier private hospitals for services and, therefore, service charges would inevitably be higher.
While leading private hospitals charge around Tk 1 lakh a day for ICU services and BMU’s regular hospital charges between Tk 15,000 and Tk 20,000, the Super Specialised Hospital’s ICU cost is likely to be somewhere in the middle: around Tk 50,000 per day.
Source: https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/bmu-hospital-set-corporate-model-4209906
