KUALA LUMPUR: The Health Ministry has instructed private healthcare facilities and laboratories to report Covid-19 cases in a timely manner to prevent delays in attending to patients and close contacts.
Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said private facilities were late in sending data to the ministry and the Public Health Laboratory Information System (Simka).
This, he said, had caused delays in the detection of close contacts.
"This would not be the case if these facilities send in the data to the respective district health offices.
"The ministry has therefore issued a circular to 23 private laboratories instructing them to immediately key in and send the necessary information to the ministry.
"We have touched on this matter before when the ministry realised that there are private laboratories that do not notify negative cases, or some are late in notifying the positive cases following screening tests conducted at the facilities."
He said during a virtual Covid-19 State of Emergency engagement session organised by the Health Ministry with the media today.
Dr Noor Hisham said as the number of Covid-19 cases increases, the ministry also needed enough manpower to identify close contacts that should be done within 24 hours.
"There was issue and challenges at the ground level when there is a surge in cases, such as delays in contact tracing.
"We are looking into increasing the number of health personnel.
"At the beginning of the third wave, the ministry had assisted the Sabah Health Department by sending health personnel from other states that do not have high cases to enable close contact tracking and screening to be carried out.
"However, as states across the country recorded spike in cases, our human resources were stretched."
He noted that he was also informed that the issue of delayed test results as occurred in Selangor has been resolved.
Dr Noor Hisham further said he hoped that the private facilities and laboratories would increase their testing capacity as the capacity in most government laboratories have reached 100 per cent.
"University labs are using about 27 per cent of their capacity to perform Covid-19 tests, while private labs are almost the same.
"We want IMR to carry out genome sequencing on test samples but there are many cases at the moment.
"Some ministry laboratories, especially in hospitals, have reached 100 percent capacity. If other laboratories can improve their testing capacity, we can work as a team."