Mahidol sets up 400-bed hospital in Samut Prakan
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Mahidol University has launched a project that will create big changes in the medical sector.
With a Bt6.2-billion budget, a 400-bed hospital will be built along with new sites for the faculties of medicine, nursing, and science in Samut Prakan’s Bang Phli district.
The new hospital will establish itself as a centre of occupational medicine and will focus on serving local residents. Samut Prakan has more than 8,000 factories and is not far from many industrial zones on the Eastern Seaboard.
“With this new facility, we are going to reform how medical students are taught and turned into doctors too,” the university’s president Dr Rajata Rajatanavin said at a press conference yesterday.
He said once the Faculty of Medicine at Ramathibodi Hospital relocated its production base for undergraduates from Bangkok to Samut Prakan, medical students would be required to stay overnight there too.
“That means the teaching will not run just from 8am to 4pm. Students can learn round the clock. They will have opportunities to get closer to their medical lecturers,” Rajata said. He believed it was going to be easier to inculcate medical ethics too.
“This is a new teaching approach,” he said.
Currently, the Faculty of Medicine can produce just 180 doctors a year. With the relocation and new facilities, it will be able to provide between 300 and 400 new doctors annually.
“The production capacity of the Faculty of Nursing will also rise from 200 graduates a year to 350,” Rajata added.
Meanwhile, the Communications Disorder Department in the Faculty of Science would be able to produce 30 scientists in that field each year once the project was completed.
Dr Winit Phuapradit, dean of Medicine at Ramathibodi Hospital, said the new hospital in Samut Prakan would be able to serve about one million outpatients and 16,640 inpatients each year.
