Health System

A transcript from the budget 2006 “A Health Tourism Unit will be established under the Ministry of Health to improve the quality of health services to attract more foreigners to seek private health services in Malaysia”. Is this is what we are aiming for? I think we need to examine our current system to cater for us Malaysian first. If we could not attract our own people to seek treatment in our own country, how are we going to attract foreigner. That is unless they are seeking for cheaper services instead of quality.

If you have relatives that is facing some serious illness and if they belong to the high income bracket, it’s almost certain that they will seek medical services from neighbouring countries like Singapore. This is enforced by a series of high profile Malaysia citizen/government officer doing so. Personally I have seen a lot of serious flaw in our medical system. We do not need to dig back faraway but you just need to look at the current dengue problem. If the newspaper does not report wrongly most patients that dies from it is those that have seek treatment but was somehow not diagnose properly. The recent is a contractor.

Personally I felt that our Health Ministry do not have a proper plan and there is not enough of publicity. Most of us will have the basic understanding that if we just did our yearly blood test with those tumour markers & etc and if its turns up fine, we are fine. Our medical professional personnel also share the same understanding. This is one big misconception. They have a very old thinking that for men, there is no urgent need to have a full medical until we reach well above 40. Actually this could be true if we are back in the 80’s or 90’s. Nowadays the society works in lightning speed hence the type of pressure we face now and then is totally different. We should push the age limit down to at least 35 or less. Even we do it earlier, is our health system has the expertise to detect chronic or serious illness earlier or they just push it aside and blame it our hectic working life and etc.

Our government have some kind of weird obsession with quantity but they never looks at the quality, refer to recent report of target to produce 2,500 doctors a year. I guess the government wants to increase the current high unemployment rate of graduates to include doctors also. It seems most of this graduate needs “re-education” again. We do not need 5 persons to fix a light bulb all we need is one good personnel to do it. Why do we keep repeating our mistakes again and again? We do not want Quantity, we want Quality? After reading Hui Ying post, I do feel there are a lot of doctors that are making mistake but it was not highly publicize. The doctor that certify my dad death was worst than me. He looks more shocked and disbelief than me. He even put his IC incorrectly in the death certification. Of course we could see a lot of blunders like the recent news in regards to nurses that could not even determine the gender of a newborn.

Most private hospital in Malaysia still runs like a sundry shop. The medical record is not centrally kept. They look pretty outstanding on the outside but it just end there. Having a good health system does not solely depend on personnel; we need to improve the infrastructure and processes also. The Health Ministry and other related ministry like agriculture and etc should start to implement checks on food product in Malaysia. Now I dare not even eat certain fruits as I could hear stories like it has been injected with certain chemical or it has been make ripe by using certain material like used battery or whatever. I could see the health ministry certify certain organic vegetables but I think the ministry should expand it to other products as well like fruits, canned foods, breads, even water filters and etc. Until then I guess I will continue to selectively choose my food…….