A friend of Singaporean Justinian Tan, who died after being struck by a car in Johor Baru last Friday, believed that "miscommunication" resulted in their belief that Sultanah Aminah Hospital required an upfront payment to treat the victim, even though it was an emergency.

According to Straits Times, Joshua De Rozario said hospital staff spoke Bahasa Malaysia, resulting in a communication breakdown.

"At that point of time, what I heard was that we had to pay and in cash - it couldn't be in card. We didn't have a large sum of money on us and we had to run around finding an ATM. From our point of view then, it felt like we had to pay first.

"Nothing was really communicated properly so it could have been a miscommunication," said De Rozario.

De Rozario said that he and his friends did pay a sum of money eventually, but eventually decided to bring Tan back to Singapore to seek treatment.

"I can't comment on whether the hospital did all they could. I'm not medically trained and we had communication problems because we did not speak much Malay.

"So we thought it was better to bring him back. Perhaps there were things lost in translation," he added.

Tan, 25, was at the Sultanah Aminah Hospital for about five hours before he was transferred to the Singapore General Hospital. He died five days after the accident – at about 12.30am on Aug 30.

Yesterday, the Health Ministry has since denied allegations that the hospital demanded upfront payments and that a deposit was collected only after Tan's family arrived at the hospital.

The Health Ministry also denied allegations that the ambulance had taken 30 minutes to arrive. These allegations were made by De Rozario to the Singaporean press after the incident.

'Felt like 30 minutes'

De Rozario now claimed that, due to the chaotic situation at the time, it "felt" as though the ambulance arrived 30 minutes after the call for emergency services was made.

"When the accident happened, a lot of things were going on at once, so the wait for help to come felt really long then. I thought it took 30 minutes but their logs said differently.

"There were quite a lot of people there and someone else called the ambulance. We were in a distressed situation and didn't know what to do. In that situation, I didn't have a sense of the time and it did feel like 30 minutes," said De Rozario.

On the decision to complain to the press, De Rozario said that he had made the issue public in hope that Tan's assailant would be found.

"We also realised that in Malaysia we didn't know what to do. Other people had to give us the embassy number and helped us in that situation. I'm saying all this not to attack the system there because I understand they operate differently and we might not have the privileges that we do in our own country.

"By speaking to the media, I want to make Singaporeans aware of the need to know emergency numbers, for example. So many of us go to JB just for supper or shopping and we don't realise we don't actually know what to do when something happens there. That's the point we want to convey.

"It's not about wanting to get revenge because that is not going to bring Justinian back. We want to close it and move on."

Tan, De Rozario and three others were in Johor Baru on Aug 25 for supper. Tan was struck by a car and succumbed to his injuries while another friend suffered some injuries.