Proceedings of the 13th Meeting of the
COMCEC Poverty Alleviation Working Group
14
He firstly provided overall profile of Malaysia which is categorized as a higher middle-income
country with USD 10,573 per capita GNI for 2017. The GINI coefficient is at 0.399. 76 percent of the
population lives in urban areas.
The Malaysian health care system is a dichotomous system where the public health sector is
complemented by private health sector. In terms of SDG and UHC, Malaysia was ranked 55th in 2018
with a score of 70 out of 100. Malaysia is often internationally recognized as having world class
healthcare facilities. There has been improvement in the life expectancy and most of mortality rates
since independence. However, as some developing countries, Malaysia is still facing various health
issues and challenges like the aging population, rapid urbanization, increasing double disease
burden, increasing health care costs, higher demand, quality and safety and crisis management.
Malaysia has made some milestones in enhancing universal health coverage. There were 144 public
hospitals and specialized medical institutions with 41995 beds, 1060 health clinics and 1803
community clinics in 2017 while in the private sector. There were 187 private hospitals with 13957
beds, over 7000 registered medical clinics and 1992 registered dental clinics. These accounts for
more than 80% of the population live within 5km radius of health facilities. To enhance the access
to the rest of the population, the government is also providing mobile health clinics (boats and
buses) and flying doctor teams.
In order to further improve access to quality healthcare, Malaysia introduced clustering hospitals
as an effort to improve sharing of resources and lean healthcare to aim for optimizing resource.
Health services at the primary care has also improved markly from predominantly focusing on
maternal and child health and outpatient care in 1960s to almost total womb to tomb care from
2010 onwards. The operating hours in some clinics has also been extended until 10 pm.
Dr. ISMAIL also mentioned about the efforts in the provision of step-down care such as the Malaysia
Cataract mobile clinic, ambulatory care/daycare services, community mental health clinics,
domiciliary care and low birth centre. Various value-added services and innovations were
introduced to improve access like mySMS, telephone&take and drive through pharmacy and postal
services for drugs. There is also enhancement of public-private partnership via outsourcing
services, collaboration on transportation and trainings.
Dr. Ismail also provided information on the financial protection which is another major component
in UHC. The public health services in Malaysia provided via general taxation and are highly
subsidized. Financial protection is also provided via pension scheme, social security benefits and
most recently the PeKa B40 which provides selected health and social benefits for group of
population aged 50yrs and above living under lowest 40% total household income in Malaysia.
Financial protection is also available within the private sector via employee benefits, Employee
Provident Fund and private health insurance.
Dr. Mohd Safiee b. ISMAIL concluded his presentation by stating that Malaysia is highly committed
to the international efforts to improve healthcare via advocating SDGs, UHC and the Astana