Ninewells Hospital rebrands under Access care
Ninewells Hospital, Sri Lanka’s only private hospital dedicated to ‘mother and baby care’ now fully owned by the Access Group of Companies, re-launched its corporate identity focusing on ‘woman and child care’ this week at Excess Towers in Colombo and along with the re-launch a new logo and a website were also introduced.
At the event, Dr. Vibash Wijeratene, Medical Director, Ninewells Hospital said that the hospital has been Sri Lanka’s leading mother and baby care hospital for the last 15 years and noted that the management thought of repositioning it as a woman and child care hospital enlarging the scope of the work to take care of the life cycle of a woman and child in total.
He said “As a hospital Ninewells is responsible for the country’s highest number of deliveries as one single hospital in the private sector and for a foreseeable future the hospital remains dedicated itself to woman and child care and that is the kind of strength that Ninewells has with it”.
Responding to an inquiry from the media and reiterating that they delivered the highest number of babies he said that the number is 4,500 per year.
He said that at entry or departure a delivery would cost around Rs. 80,000 to 100,000 for a normal delivery and for a caesarean section would be around Rs. 125,000 to 150,000 and professional charges would also be added to this amount.
He said that they are open to international and local patients and the rebranding of the hospital and the new strategy is focused on expanding their services from mother and baby care hospital to a woman and child hospital.
On the sidelines of the event, Dr. Wijeratne told the Business Times that they are extremely cautious and careful in computing costs and are transparent and anybody can scrutinize it in the national and human interest. He said that the private sector hospitals are taking off a major burden from the public sector hospitals and indicated that 50 per cent of the outpatients are treated by the private hospitals and 20 per cent of inpatients too.
He said: “When you think of a hospital in the private sector like Ninewells we always make sure we keep our cost at a bare minimum and on top of that surely being a private company we got to have some margins and what you call it – contributions towards profits and we have to maintain that also”.
He said that they are trying their best to be very competitive. He indicated that definitely the private hospitals are helping the government in a big way or otherwise this load of patients will also end up in public sector hospitals and would be an unbearable burden on them. Therefore, he asserted that they take some burden out of it and try and help the patient and there is a segment that could afford services at a reasonable price.
He also said that if that service is not provided by the private hospitals in the country, they may end up going to other countries for that service, since there are countries who are very famous for medical tourism like Singapore and some western countries.