KUCHING: Big pharmaceutical companies coming to Sarawak for research for small initiatives is a testament of a new Sarawak and how good local Sarawakian talents are, says Deputy Premier Datuk Amar Dr Sim Kui Hian.
“The other thing about this initiative is, increasingly we are very grateful for all these big drug companies coming to Sarawak for research, for small initiatives like this.
“We are as good as anywhere else in the world. If everybody has that type of attitude and mindset, I think Sarawak (by) 2030 we are not only prosperous in terms of money, but it would be the beginning of prosperity in talents.”
He told reporters this after officiating the Heart2Miss programme at Sarawak General Hospital (SGH) Auditorium, today (June 14).
He added that prosperity in talents would serve as incredible importance to the service economy.
“The service economy in Singapore, most of the income now is from service economies and it takes time to build.”
With international people and international pharmaceutical companies coming in, it would accelerate the process of prospering the service economy, he noted.
Meanwhile, AstraZeneca together with SGH announced a new collaboration to roll-out Heart2Miss, a pilot study aimed at addressing the challenges of heart failure diagnosis and transforming care for Type-2 diabetic patients with heart failure.
Commenting on this partnership, AstraZeneca Malaysia country president Vinod Narayanan said AstraZeneca looks at healthcare beyond the lens of medicines alone.
“As a global healthcare player, we have a pivotal role to play in addressing healthcare challenges and we know that intense collaboration with multiple partners is needed to co create solutions that transform the health ecosystem in ways that best support the unmet needs of patients and improve the patient pathway.”
As the initiator of the Heart2Miss study, Dr Diana Foo, the principal investigator of Heart2Miss, CRC SGH, stated that in Malaysia the average age of their patients with heart failure is getting younger.
“Nearly 1 in 5 patients were readmitted within 30 days, and 1 in 3 died within 1 year of heart failure admission.
“The Heart2Miss project aims to address this issue by extending diagnostics from the hospital to the community to identify people at high risk even before symptoms manifest. This will allow us to intervene earlier and hopefully prevent heart failure altogether,” she said.
By implementing innovative screening methods, she noted the aim is to screen 1000 patients in a year driving a higher rate for Heart Failure (HF) diagnosis in high risk diabetic patients and reducing 30 per cent of inappropriate referrals for echo.
