MAHKOTA MEDICAL CENTRE IN MELAKA TO EXPAND

Mahkota Medical Centre to expand

KUALA LUMPUR: Mahkota Medical Group, a unit of Singapore-listed Health Management International Ltd (HMI), will spend between RM250 million and RM300 million to expand the Mahkota Medical Centre in Malacca.

The medical centre, which is now a 280-bed facility, wants to add another 220 beds. The expansion is expected to be ready by end-2014.

"We are in midst of planning and should start development in mid-2012," chief executive officer Timothy Chang said, adding that it has 1.22ha of undeveloped land located next to the hospital and across the road from the hospital.

"We are targeting to have a total of 500 beds," Chang told Business Times in a phone interview.

Chang said the 500-bed capacity will be able to cater for the needs of the hospital for between 10 and 15 years.

The investment will include equipment.

Currently, the average occupancy at the hospital is around 65 per cent. It is fully occupied during the peak months of medical tourism.

Mahkota Medical is centrally located within the Malacca city and now has some 40 clinics. As it expands, it hopes to have 100 clinics and to handle more complex cases.

The hospital aims to establish itself as a one-stop medical centre with centres on sub-specialties. The population in Malacca alone will not be able to support the hospital.

Accordingly, it is eyeing patients from Negri Sembilan and the northern part of Johor.

Chang, meanwhile, expects the return on investment (ROI) on the new wing to take half the time that a new hospital will normally take. New hospitals, generally, take eight to 10 years to recover their ROI.

However, the Mahkota Medical Centre expects to see ROI within five years as it is already an established hospital.

Moreover, since the opening up of its beds will be done in stages, some of the space may be temporarily used as lodging for relatives accompanying the foreign patients.

Mahkota Medical Centre started operations in 1994 under the Lion Group.

Lion, which restructured and sold its non-core businesses during the 1997/98 financial crisis, sold the hospital in September 2001.

Mahkota Medical Group is 48.95 per cent owned by HMI, while Bumiputera group Maju Medik Sdn Bhd holds 38.42 per cent and 12.36 per cent is held by doctors located all over Malaysia.