Clinic Operations

In Bangladesh, low and middle-income populations have limited access and are unable to financially bear the cost of quality healthcare and diagnostic services. In many cases, these citizens cannot afford treatments or services due to high out-of-pocket expenditures. On average, Bangladeshi citizens pay 72.7% of the total cost for the treatment (World Bank, 2019) which creates a significant financial burden for poor families and lead to debt in most cases.

Considering health scenarios of the country, SMC started its clinic operation in April 2018. The first clinic is branded as “SMC Niltara Clinic”. The clinic has been established to offer services at an affordable rate for all segments of the population. The mission of this pilot initiative is to develop a sustainable model Clinic with the provision of consultation, diagnostic and a model pharmacy. The vision of this initiative is to expand the Clinic operation in other strategic locations of Bangladesh based on positive learning of current experience. The SMC Niltara Clinic is located at 30/1 Hazi Dil Mohammad Avenue, Dhaka Uddan, Mohammadpur, Dhaka-1207. The Clinic location was selected considering the availability of garment factories and the concentration of low and middle-income populations. SMC initiated another Clinic (named SMC Clinic) in SMC Tower-2 at Darussalam, Mirpur, Dhaka in June 2021 following the outstanding success of SMC Niltara Clinic.

This Clinic is also being operated with the same mode and principles as Niltara Clinic.

In addition to general consultation by the graduate doctors, the Clinics have provision of other consultancy services in Gynecology, Medicine, Pediatric, Cardiology, Endocrinology and Orthopedics. SMC has planned to increase consultancy services in other disciplines as well. The Clinics are open 7 days a week (except government holidays) from 08.00 am to 10.00 pm. All kinds of medicines, vaccines and relevant non-pharmaceutical products are available in the pharmacy and sell it at affordable prices.

Clinic arranges different types of promotional activities like Miking for publicity, distributing leaflets, sending SMS and conducting IPC at community. The clinic staff receives training at regular intervals on different clinic and service management issues including counseling to improve the quality of services. As a part of regular monitoring, head office staff conduct quality assurance inspections every month. SMC does calibration of its clinic equipment regularly to receive better performance from those instruments. Under the quality inspection of laboratory test results, there is a provision for cross-checking different laboratory test results from the other prominent diagnostic centers. In addition, there is a complaint/suggestion box at the clinic premise for the clients. Clinic staff encourages each client to drop him/her complaint(s) or suggestion(s) in the Box, if any. SMC management reviews those issues from time to time for taking corrective measures, if required. In addition to the program staff, internal audit team of SMC visits the clinic to monitor all kinds of compliance issues. Mor eover, SMC’s research department conducts exit interviews with the clients to understand the service quality and their feedback for performance improvements. The following graphs show growth of clients where only 9,834 clients received services in the second year which increased to 22,036 within the next four years. SMC Clinic has also served 12,862 clients in the initial year. The Niltara Clinic achieved a remarkable growth of cost recovery against the operating expenses.Both clinics, laboratories and pharmacies are ISO 9001-2015 certified. Both the clinics have become the trusted healthcare facility in the neighborhood day by day for its quality, service expansion and affordability. It is planned that these model clinics will recover its full operating cost within 6-7 years.

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