When Thabo Mbeki visited Kantha Bopha II children’s hospital in Phnom Penh last week, the South African president was sympathetic about the obstacles facing hospital staff operating in a nation entrenched in poverty and corruption.
“We too have problems like these,” Mbeki told Kantha Bopha’s director and founder, Dr Beat Richner.
Doctors from developing countries need training in how to manage hospitals independently of graft and profiteering, Richner said. This is the founding principle behind the Kantha Bopha Center, a conference and education center for Cambodian and international postgraduate medical students that opens today in Siem Reap.
Though some practical medical training will be given at the center, Richner’s vision for the Center focuses on ethics.
“We want to teach students how to build and run pediatric and obstetric hospitals that are free of corruption,” he said.
Courses will be taught by local staff, French medical professionals and by Richner himself, and will begin in mid-2003.
Jean-Francois Frys, executive director of Medicam, welcomed the center as a step forward in the battle against corruption of Cambodia’s medical profession. “The problem of corruption is so huge that any project that tries to address it is most welcome,” Frys said. But the issue is double-edged, he cautioned, and although ethical training is a vital element of combating graft, “as long as medical staff receive less than a living wage, that’s a problem for Cambodia,” Frys said.
The center, on the grounds of the Jayavarman VII Children’s Hospital, consists of a medical library stocked with $250,000-worth of medical books and reference materials, four small lecture theaters that seat 60 students each, one theater that seats 200 and one large hall designed to accommodate 600.
The center cost $3.5 million, $650,000 of which came from the Swiss government. The rest was given by private donors, Richner said.
The center’s inauguration also marks the 10th anniversary of the first Kantha Bopha children’s hospital in Phnom Penh.
