services to the areas that are accessible by land transportation, leaving the interior villages, numbering 323 villages out of a total of 869, to the JHEOA. Nevertheless, there are major shortfalls in health service provision to the Orang Asli. The JHEOA itself, in its Orang Asli Community Health Action Plan (JHEOA 2005), points to the lack of comprehensive health services in the interior villages. The same document attributes the falling admissions rate in Gombak Hospital, now a 166-bed hospital, to the shunting of Orang Asli patients to MOH facilities. There are, however, other organizational problems that may be related to this. Since the early 1990s, there has been no governmental recruitment of Orang Asli paramedics or health providers. This is diametrically opposite to the policy adopted by Dr. Bolton and his team in the 1960s. There has been no official reason for this but some past officers of JHEOA have attributed this state of affairs to the prejudices of certain JHEOA decision-makers, while the JHEOA on its part contends that there were no qualified applicants from the Orang Asli for these roles. This time period was also marked by a high level of corruption in the JHEOA as acknowledged by a former senior officer of the JHEOA (Mohd. Tap 1990: 84, 104). Newspapers even reported that hospital staff had turned parts of the Gombak hospital premises into daylight gambling dens (Berita Harian, 3 March 1984, 10 March 1984). Orang Asli were often treated condescendingly or berated when some minor error or omission occurred. As such, many Orang Asli said that they did want to go to the hospital because the employees did not treat them with respect (cf. Gianno 2004: 64) or because they were insensitive, discriminatory, and unfriendly (Harrison 2001). This is not to suggest that there are no instances of exemplary dedication and sensitive dispensation of healthcare to the Orang Asli today. We ORANG ASLI – RIGHTS, PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS 47