PETALING JAYA: Malaysian healthcare industry members have been challenged to improve services.

In giving the thumbs up to medical tourism, Malaysian Medical Association president Dr Ashok Philip said the healthcare sector should keep improving its services to meet patients’ needs.

He said more private medical centres were being accredited by the Malaysian Society for Quality in Healthcare and the Joint Commission International.

“Because of that, foreign patients have a fair amount of confidence,” he said in a telephone interview.

He was responding to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak’s announcement on Tuesday that medical tourism would be made a priority for Malaysia.

Malaysia had 770,000 medical tourists last year, bringing in around RM700mil in revenue.

The number is expected to rise to 930,000, with an estimated revenue of RM1bil, he said.

Dr Ashok said the country was attracting medical tourists in a big way and had many repeat customers, especially from Indonesia.

Asked if medical tourism might worsen the brain drain in public healthcare, Dr Ashok agreed that private hospitals generally roped in more specialists from the public sector.

And for this reason, the Health Ministry encouraged more doctors to go for alternative ways of getting their Master’s degrees.

However, Fomca secretary-general Datuk Paul Selvaraj is worried that with increasing demands from medical tourism, the private sector would keep taking specialists from the public sector and this would cause a longer waiting period for patients there.

“The focus should be on improving healthcare for Malaysians first,” he said.

Resources : The Star Online