Our History

HKL is an institution of excellence in health care and our nation’s referral center. As the largest hospital in Malaysia and one of the biggest in Asia, it has about 2,331 in-patients and the out-patients departments see an average of 4,000 out-patients a day. These patients coming in are not under control. There are helpless patients after they are discharged they really have no shelter or food after they leave the hospital wards.

Some are brought in for treatment by the kind-hearted public who saw them sick and helplessly lying on the streets. Others are by family members, relatives, next of kin or friends who send them to the government hospitals for treatment and they refused to take them (the patients) out of the hospitals. Even though they are now stable, fit to be discharged. There are also those sickly senior citizens who are abandoned by society because they have outlived their usefulness. Those who went back to the streets just die of mild nutrition, sickness or hunger by the roadside. In view of that many prefer to stay put in the hospital.

All the government welfare homes are full and many are over crowded, they take their time to take in inmates, that is, only when there are vacancies.

Government hospitals are meant for treating patients with serious illnesses and are not for senior citizens or the homeless to stay until their final days.   They are the ones that are causing congestion in the wards.

There are also hundreds of old people have been abandoned by their children or next-of-kin who give false addresses and telephone contact numbers to the hospital, to prevent the hospital authorities from tracing them. They just shirk the responsibility of taking care of their sickly family members. The hospital faces the shortage of beds and the welfare homes are full most of the time, some are overcrowded. The worst scenario is that the number of patients abandoned in HKL keeps growing. This hospital tops the list of hospitals with the most abandoned people

“RumahKasih” offers free shelter, food and medical treatment for the discharged poor, homeless, old and terminally ill abandoned patients. Here, we have diabetics without limbs, cancer patients disowned by their children, mentally-challenged people whose families could not be traced, paralytic patients and accident victims, old people who have simple outlived their usefulness. Too old, sick or handicapped to work. Some abandoned people have no one to turn to in the entire world. Some of their families are too poor, and some have faded out of memory.