Malaysia forms council to promote healthcare tourism

The Malaysian Health Ministry is setting up the Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC) to promote and develop the health tourism industry for the country and position the country as a healthcare hub in the region.

Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai says, “It will serve as the primary agency to promote and develop the health tourism industry. The Government is concerned about the health development in Malaysia. The country is now ready to elevate itself to another level which is medical tourism.”

The council will be initially established as a department in the Ministry of Health and be answerable to an advisory committee, that will deal with policy issues and set direction for the healthcare industry, chaired by Liow and co-chaired by Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yakcop of the Prime Minister’s Department. The MHTC committee will comprise representatives from the government and private sector involved in health.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak has identified health tourism as one of the strategies for rapid, sustained and higher economic growth. Malaysia received 375,000 medical tourists in 2008, according to the Association of Private Hospitals of Malaysia, and the figure is expected to be higher this year. Liow adds “Medical tourism has 20 percent growth every year and we still expect 10 percent growth this year despite the economic downturn. We are also promoting eye-care, besides dental and normal medical care in order to boost the country’s health tourism industry.”

The council will be established as a corporate entity under the Companies Act 1965 after three years to ensure that the council’s operation is smooth and stable. One of its first jobs will be to investigate concerns that strict regulation by the Medicine Advertising Board on advertising for health tourism. Liow comments “These are very old policies that could stagnant the industry. With this new Government policy, we will have to overhaul all existing policies on medical advertising.”

Liow also says that making the Malaysian healthcare system safer had always been a key goal of his ministry and a core element of its many quality improvement activities. He points out that Malaysia is a strong supporter of the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s World Alliance for Patient Safety and became one of the earliest signatories, in May 2006, “The achievement of patient safety is a major challenge for everyone in the Malaysian healthcare system. While much has been done to improve safety, much more remains to be done.”

The ministry will be launching its Safe Surgery Check list for hospitals later this year .One of the accepted best practices for patient safety is to establish a no-blame reporting culture by initiating an incident reporting and learning system for adverse events or near misses. For the government hospitals, a set of 22 clinical incidents have been developed in 2008 using the WHO International Classification for Patient Safety.

Ministers say that efforts to promote medical tourism will not affect the quality of healthcare enjoyed by locals, as the main provider for healthcare tourism is the private sector.