TMC is probably the most popular maternity hospital. They claim (according to MOH survey on average actual hospital bill sizes) to be the cheapest for all but one type of delivery cases, and 2nd cheapest for that other one. But price aside, how is TMC? On the whole… great, though their backend administration could do with much improvement.
We were fortunate to get the newly renovated ward on Level 6 (usual maternity cases are on Levels 3 and 5, both not yet renovated). The renovated wards are brighter and more cheery… sure makes the hospital stay more enjoyable. We had to kick some fuss to get the ward though. When we “checked-in”, the hospital had somehow booked us into a 4-bedder room. But we had said we wanted single room, and had already indicated so in a form we submitted to the hospital (by-hand… so it couldn’t have been mislaid through the post) a long time back. The registration lady said no rooms available on the renovated Level 6, but they have in some other non-renovated ward. We displayed some annoyance and so she checked again and oh they “managed to re-arrange some patients” so there is now a single room in Level 6 available. Like real. How do you get rid of a patient in a room if there was one there… and even if they tried to do that, we couldn’t possibly walk into a cleaned-up room less than 10 minutes later.
The nurses and other staff in the ward are generally quite nice. They will spend time to be with you if you need help. I must say they respond reasonably fast when you use the call bell (I’ve seen how in some other hospitals the call bell might as well be “for show”).
Checkout time wasn’t good. Someone from Patient Services Centre was suppose to present the bill to the room. We waited. The nurses noted the delay and chased for the bill. Ok the bill came. The lady explained the bill details… and oh uh, she couldn’t figure out how something summed up. Bad. But nevermind, she’ll go and find out and come back to us. She took so long… I asked the nurses to check. The billing lady came back and apologized… apparently no one could figure it out but assured me that the bill must be correct because it was generated by a computer! Alamak! And I should call back the next working day should I have any concern.
Fine, nevermind, but there was one other minor detail in the bill that was clearly wrongly charged. It was a miserly $15 (insignificant compared to the total bill…) that I was willing to overlook, but she said this can be easily rectified. She took my credit card and said she would be back in no time. Ok… I picked up some stuffs (bags and various other barang barang), walked to the lift, went from Level 6 to Level 1 during peak hour (it does take a while), went over to my car, loaded the stuff into the car, went back to the lift, went back up to Level 6… waited, got impatient, dragged the remaining items to the nurses station to wait, the baby waited so long the nurses felt necessary to put the baby back into the nursery… before finally the billing lady returned. Sigh.
Ok, I suppose when you’re at a hospital, the medical and nursing care is most important. Luckily they did well in that area 🙂
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