Malaysia's Journey Towards Transformation Of Healthcare System

By Tengku Noor Shamsiah Tengku Abdullah SINGAPORE, March 29 (Bernama) -- Malaysia is in the midst of a journey towards the transformation of its healthcare system to ensure successful and sustainable, relevant health care needs of its citizens. Disclosing this, Malaysian Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the Malaysian healthcare system needed to evolve. "In fact, we have evolved quite a long time since independence and have achieved great success. Based on the success that we achieved, we know that the present system has come to an optimum level. "We have been given two years to come up with a blueprint (on healthcare transformation). By 2014, we hope this blueprint will be ready and the public can continue to be engaged and give the feedback," he told Bernama after the Ministerial Dialogue session at The Economist's 'Healthcare in Asia 2012' conference here Wednesday. Liow is among the panelists who spoke at the dialogue session at the two-day conference. The minister noted that Malaysia needed evolution in its healthcare system due to the changing trends in disease pattern, changing socio-demography, example, due to ageing population, increased expectations from the public for explicit quality and better services, without having to pay more for them. He said this also due to the increased healthcare costs and overly-burdened public sector, following increased demand from the public. "What we are doing now is, we are not waiting until the healthcare system stumbles and only then, we work on transforming the healthcare system. "That is why, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak has directed us (health ministry) to embark on this journey of transformation of the healthcare system," said Liow. By the year 2020, Liow hoped the Malaysian healthcare system was more developed whereby, the people had a choice to go to either the private or government healthcare to enjoy affordable quality care. -- BERNAMA