My late father, a former State Health Director of three states, believed in our government hospitals with his whole heart. He trusted the government's general hospital (GH) system so deeply that he chose to be treated there in his final years, dismissing the long waiting times as a small price to pay for what he felt was excellent care.
That deep-seated confidence was passed down to us. So, when my fiercely independent, soon-to-be 88-year-old mother—a woman who had stubbornly avoided doctors for years—had breathing difficulty and asked to be taken to the hospital earlier in September, we did not hesitate for a moment and rushed her to the Ipoh GH (formal name, Hospital Raja Permaisuri Bainun). We believed she would be in the safest hands possible.
We were entirely wrong.
By 9 pm, she was rushed into the red zone, struggling with low oxygen and fitted with a breathing helmet. Because it was a critical emergency area, we were forced to wait outside, only allowed in periodically before being instructed to go home at midnight. We left her there, trusting the system would protect her.
That decision remains a heavy cloud of guilt over us as her children.
While she received immediate specialist care, she was left utterly alone in her fear. No one bothered to explain the treatment process or how to cope with the suffocating breathing helmet. She was left to manage her own phlegm, unable to spit it out and forced to swallow it instead. She was parched yet placed on a strict 500ml daily water restriction without a single word of explanation from the staff.
By 2 am, hungry and exhausted, her requests to borrow a phone to call us turned into desperate begging. She was ignored. When a doctor finally handed her a phone at 7 am, it was not with comfort, but with a chilling remark: "I pity you".
It was not just my mother who went through such an unpleasant experience. I soon realised that patients who complained were often treated as senile or mad, having their limbs tied to the bed railings as a form of control. In another devastating instance, I witnessed a mother break down completely when she finally located her terminally ill daughter. The hospital staff had moved the young woman from one section of the emergency ward to another without informing the family, leaving the terrified mother to mistakenly believe her daughter had passed away.
The emergency ward itself was an image of a war zone. Over three nights and four days, my mother was shifted through different zones of the emergency ward. From critical care to Observation and finally to Waiting To Be Warded, without a proper ward bed ever materialising. Not even at 3rd class.
Taking a closer look at the ward revealed a grim reality: 70% of the patients were elderly, lying on mattresses so thin they bruised fragile bones. They were placed on rickety beds with broken side railings, some held together by discarded bandages functioning as ropes. In all that time, there was no chance to shower or even step foot on the floor.
Worse than the broken facilities was the broken empathy.
The medical staff moved from bed to bed with zero eye contact, functioning like robots administering routine tasks on a factory assembly line, rather than human beings caring for the sick. When my mother tried to explain that her osteoarthritis and thinning skin made being handled incredibly painful, she was scolded for being a complainer. In one horrifying instance, a nurse misread my mother’s attempt to wriggle away from the pain as stubbornness, forcing her arm down so roughly it tore an 8cm by 0.5cm patch of skin right off her forearm.
Outside the ward, we faced security guards acting like little emperors, arbitrarily dictating when and how we could visit and chasing us out of the emergency ward when we stayed longer than 10 minutes. I watched as these same guards stopped an entire family from seeing their dying mother, rigidly enforcing a rule that only one person could enter at a time. This heartless bureaucracy deprived a grieving family of the chance to share those precious last moments together.
Malaysia is an ageing nation, yet our healthcare professionals seem profoundly unequipped to handle the elderly with the dignity they deserve. The doctors treating my mother made it clear they viewed her simply as an "end of life" heart failure case, focusing their conversations on resuscitation decisions rather than explaining her medical condition to us. It makes one wonder—echoing the sentiments of MP Syerleena Abdul Rashid regarding her own late father—where all the allocated hospital funds are actually going.
By the fourth day of being in the emergency ward, the mental anguish was destroying her. We made the difficult choice to discharge her against medical advice. That trauma put her off hospitals entirely, so we rented oxygen equipment and nursed her at home. It was a slow journey, but thankfully, a month later, she is finally doing better.
As I watch her recover in the comfort of her own home, I am left mourning the system my father so proudly defended.
Whilst the doctors were excellent in the immediate treatment and medical equipment might keep a body alive, it is human connection that heals — a connection utterly absent among medical staff who treat patients merely as tasks on a checklist. When hospital administrators accept rickety beds and a total lack of basic comfort as standard care, and when the Health Ministry allows public healthcare governance to decay with zero accountability, the system has not just failed; it has lost its soul.
Until the government remembers that genuine healthcare requires both humanity and strict oversight, our public hospitals will remain grim processing centres for the sick, rather than places of true healing.
Coco Nut (anitadharam@yahoo.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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