Healthcare Equipment Production Needed to Fight Trade Mafias

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) Ministry’s special staffer, Arya Sinulingga, revealed in an online discussion how the government intends to fend-off ‘mafias’ in the healthcare equipment industry. One of them is by boosting the local production of ventilators, which has become an essential tool to treat patients of coronavirus (COVID-19). 

“With the existence of domestic products, traders will not have enough room to play with,” said Arya on Sunday, April 19.

As of now, ventilators are being developed by several local parties ranging from government institutions up to state universities such as The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), and the University of Indonesia (UI). 

However, these locally-developed medical ventilators are designed for non-severe cases and are yet able to fulfill the needs of hospital emergency rooms. Apart from that, Arya also said that the development of ventilators needs to be medically-tested prior to a large-scale production batch. 

“The state-owned ministry can start production if the clinical tests are done quickly,” said Arya. 

He also announced that the ministry has appointed at least three SOEs to handle the production of the medical ventilators that comprise PT Dirgantara Indonesia, PT Pindad, and PT LEN. 

During the discussion, Arya revealed that he suspected mafias existed in the medical equipment industry following a high amount of imports on the equipment even though there had been promising updates on locally developed ones. “Why must we import. This means there are traders, Pak Erick Thohir (SOE Minister) thought that there must be someone that is forcing this trading to go on,” he said.

Arya also revealed that the imports of healthcare-related products constitute 90 percent of the existing equipment, raw medical ingredients, and medicines in the country. 

CAESAR AKBAR