Staff at the Phnom Penh Municipal Referral Hospital on Tuesday staged a protest against the municipal health department, alleging that it had given their building to a private company in another secretive “land swap” deal involving state property.
About 80 medical professionals gathered outside the normally busy hospital in Prampi Makara district Tuesday waving placards with slogans such as “Unite Against Corruption. No Selling or Moving Hospitals.”
The protest took place as the hospital’s director, Dr. Neth Sovireak, met with Municipal Health Department Director Sok Sokhun to discuss an order for the hospital’s staff to move to a different, smaller building some 300 meters away.
Contacted later Tuesday, Mr. Sokhun said that the hospital was “not up to standard” and that the Phnom Penh health department did not want to maintain it any longer and had traded it to a private company, the name of which he “could not remember.”
“Two or three years ago, we made a deal with a private company to take over the hospital building,” Mr. Sokhun said.
“The company has built a replacement building for the hospital to move to and now it is time to move. Why are they protesting?”
Dr. Sovireak, the hospital director, declined to comment on the protest by his staff, or the state hospital swap.
The demonstrators, however, including the hospital’s deputy director Dr. Hong Lee Kuong, said the new building was inadequate.
“We deliver more than 200 babies per month in this hospital. In the new building, there is simply not enough space to do so,” Dr. Lee Kuong said.
“They have told us that the hospital was extremely dangerous and that they want to fix it, but they have not told us if we will be moving back [to the referral hospital] or anything else. We know nothing,” he said.
A 56-year-old doctor, who asked to be identified only as Maly for fear of repercussions, referred to a similar case in 2011 as a good reason for why hospital staff could not trust the health department.
In June of that year, former Phnom Penh Governor Kep Chuktema ordered the Chamkar Mon Referral Hospital, on the corner of Norodom Boulevard and Street 294, shut down for three months for renovations.
The Chamkar Mon facility is now deserted, housing only razor-wire barricades, and, according to Maly, about 20 of its staff have made their own way to employment at the Phnom Penh Municipal Referral Hospital.
“They told us to take a break for three months [from Chamkar Mon Referral Hospital]. That was three years ago. How can we believe anything they tell us?” Maly said.
“We believe that they have done a deal with a Vietnamese company and that is where their interest lies. The new building seems like it was not even built to be a hospital.”
At the new building Tuesday, the elevator shaft remained door-less, construction workers were still plastering and painting and a man lay asleep behind what will become the reception desk. Not a single room inside the newly built five-floor facility was ready to take patients.
Despite this, a handwritten statement bearing the name of the municipal health department’s Mr. Sokhun was distributed to the protesters Tuesday, warning them that if administration and accounting staff did not begin moving immediately to the new building, the hospital’s director, Dr. Sovireak, would be fired.
The hospital staff refused to move Tuesday, and said they will continue to protest unless the health department agrees to build an additional two buildings at the new site.
Many of the protesting hospital workers also referred Tuesday to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s 2007 edict that state land and property swaps would not involve hospitals and schools.
“Please your excellencies, try to maintain current locations of schools and hospitals of all levels…. Absolutely do not swap locations of any of these,” Mr. Hun Sen said in a public speech that was broadcast widely at the time.
Phay Siphan, spokesman for the Council of Ministers, said he was not aware of the hospital land swap or the protesting doctors, and suggested that Mr. Hun Sen’s directive banning such deals with private companies still applied.
“If [Mr. Hun Sen] said, then that is it,” Mr. Siphan said of the prime minister’s 2007 statement.
However, Mr. Siphan had one caveat: “It just depends if the deal [to swap the hospital with] the company was made before or after [Hun Sen] said it.”
