Penang: The Health Ministry is taking several steps, including restructuring positions of medical officers and conducting a study on the maldistribution of doctors to tackle the lack of specialists in the country’s health facilities. Its deputy minister, Datuk Lukanisman Awang Sauni, added that the approval by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to add 800 specialists annually since 2023 could address the need for medical specialists.
According to BERNAMA News Agency, at the same time, there have been amendments to the Medicines Act 1971 by creating a parallel pathway programme to create more specialists through this alternative route. Currently, there are around 692 specialists using the parallel pathway and also 6,211 medical officers undergoing specialist training. Lukanisman shared these updates with reporters after attending the officiation of the Miracle Baby Programme (Second Mission), a partnership between the Penang Hospital, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), and Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospital, India. The event at the Penang Hospital was launched by Raja Permaisuri of Perak, Tuanku Zara Salim.
He was addressing news reports claiming that the yearly decline in registered doctors and trainee doctors-5,607 in 2021, 4,749 in 2022, and 4,316 in 2023 according to the Malaysian Medical Council-and the trend of trainee doctor resignations had contributed to the lack of specialists at government hospitals and clinics. Lukanisman also mentioned that the MOH was discussing requests by Sabah and Sarawak for a method to bring specialists from Peninsular Malaysia by offering small incentives.
He noted that the lack of specialists was a continuous issue as there were many fields that lacked specialists, and the ministry was implementing specialist training, with 1,650 slots to train specialists offered through the federal training programme. ‘The MOH is currently fine-tuning ‘future-ready’ policies where we will use private sector expertise for certain services based on our experience during the COVID-19 pandemic where we outsourced to private hospitals,’ he said, emphasizing that Malaysia had sufficient capability and supply as well as public-private sector synergy to offer specialist services.