R.I.P.A.S Hospital is also a major teaching hospital in the country for doctors, medical students and nursing students in collaboration with Institute of Medicine, University Brunei Darussalam, Faculty of Medicine of University of Queensland, Australia and the Pengiran Anak Puteri Rashidah Sa’adatul College of Nursing, Brunei Darussalam.
R.I.P.A.S hospital has gone through several expansion programs with regards to its infrastructure as well as its services to accommodate the growing demands of healthcare users. The latest infrastructure expansions include the building of a Specialists’ Clinic premise and additional state of the art operating theatres to make the operation theatres 11. In the pipeline is further expansion of facilities for the whole hospital, as well as expansion projects listed under the National Healthcare Strategic Plan mapped out for year 2000-2010. There include research facilities and upgrading the women and children healthcare services.
The total manpower of R.I.P.A.S hospital is nearly 2,400 of which 200 are highly-qualified medical doctors of various disciplines, over 870 are trained nurses, more than 150 are professionals in the clinical support services including the pharmacists, physiotherapists, scientific officers and many others. Human resource continuous professional development programs are being given a high priority to ensure high professionalism in the overall healthcare services.
In terms of specialists training, some departments in R.I.P.A.S. Hospital have been accredited by the Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of Surgeons, United Kingdom since 1982 onwards. R.I.P.A.S. Hospital has been accredited for basic specialist medical training by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health Clinic. In the year 2000, the hospital gained further accreditable as a teaching hospital by Queensland University Hospital.
R.I.P.A.S Hospital is also in the midst of implementing TQM standards in all its units in line with its plan towards achieving ISO 9000 standards hospital wide. There is also a plan to obtain Joint Commission International (JCI) Accreditation for R.I.P.A.S Hospital.
Apart from continuous professional development programs for its staff, R.I.P.A.S Hospital also organises a lot of public awareness programs. Some of the programs include public lectures, production of medical articles, public health screening road shows, Healthy lifestyle promotions, set up support groups for certain illnesses and many others.
R.I.P.A.S Hospital used to send cardiac patients who need further tertiary treatments not provided in R.I.P.A.S Hospital to overseas but now since Gleneagles JPMC Cardiac Centre has been in operation, all the patients are channelled to them. JPMC is a private Hospital based in the Capital. In fact through this mutually beneficial arrangement, both institutions have been dependent on each other. RIPAS Hospital on the other hand also received other complicated cases referred from JPMC for specialties services which are not offered there for example patients developing renal complications.
R.I.P.A.S Hospital’s main focus is to give the people of Brunei Darussalam high quality services sustainable by the Government. But its future plans, includes its vision of being the Centre of Healthcare Excellence in the region where it could then generate revenue for the Government through Medical Tourism. |
