13-May-16 With the Philhealth mandate to cover 100% of the population, demand for quality, affordable healthcare is on the rise. The largest private provider, Metro Pacific, counts eleven hospitals with 3,000 beds. A relatively new entrant is the Qualimed Health Network, owned by Mercado Hospital Group and Ayala Land. Qualimed has seven facilities with four more scheduled to open in 2016. [image: Inquirer]

12-May-16 India's National Pharmaceutical Pricing Agency has reduced the prices of 54 indispensable medicines; the cut going up to 55%. This move, a repetition of an earlier revision that capped the prices of another 54 drugs, aims at ensuring that important medication, becomes affordable for a wider strata of people. [image: Getty Images]

12-May-16 More than 50% of asthma patients have poor control of their disease, according to the Society of Asthma and Allergy and Clinical Immunology in HCMC. It said many patients had not received proper treatment. A number of local medical establishments do not have a spirometry machine, and some do not have technicians skilled in using it. [image: vnexpress.net]

12-May-16 Parkway's new hospital was to provide a 250-bed private facility in downtown Yangon. The previous government had approved the project, saying it would improve healthcare standards, but that decision has been reversed by the Lower House. Some parliamentarians, medical practitioners and citizens argued that as it is on government-owned public land, the hospital should be a public facility. [image: Myanmar Insider]

12-May-16 70% of novice nurses in Taiwan are given less than one month of training before officially beginning their work, with 40% given less than two weeks of training. Wu Chia-ling, an executive director of the Taiwan Radical Nurse Union, argued that the lack of training damages patients' interests and puts the nurses under extremely heavy pressure. [image: Focus Taiwan]