KUALA LUMPUR, March 24 — Private hospitals in Malaysia are aggressively competing for nurses, often poaching staff from one another in what industry leaders describe as an unsustainable cycle that threatens the stability of the health care sector.
“In terms of nursing, it’s not just before or after Covid—we’ve always had shortages. You would agree that hospitals are poaching each other’s nurses right in the corridors,” UM Specialist Centre (UMSC) chief executive Norzaiton Senusi said during a panel discussion at the Future Healthcare Asia 2025 conference here last February 19.
Norzaiton said that during job interviews, UMSC frequently encounters candidates who have recently worked at competing private hospitals, including Sunway and Aurelius Healthcare. The trend, she argued, is destabilising the industry.
“When will the poaching of nurses end?” she asked. “It’s just like the poaching of doctors.”
Norzaiton suggested contractual measures to prevent frequent job-hopping among nurses, similar to restrictions UMSC places on its specialist doctors.
“At UMSC, we don’t allow our doctors to work elsewhere, and vice versa. Even though it’s hard to implement, we put it in their contracts that if they do, they have to pay us a bailout. I think we need to do something similar for nurses, otherwise, this will go nowhere,” she said.
“Today, Sunway may offer higher pay, but tomorrow, another hospital will come in and pay even more. When will it stop? What will happen to the industry and health care in this country?”
Norzaiton said nurses frequently change jobs for salary increases of just a “few hundred ringgit more,” a practice she said is unsustainable. She urged private hospitals to work with the Malaysian Nursing Board to discourage excessive job-hopping.
While advocating for restrictions, she also stressed the need to improve nurses’ working conditions. “At the end of the day, they are just human,” she said. “They work extended hours. They leave their families behind to work in KL, coming from Kelantan and elsewhere.”
Citing recent salary revisions at UMSC, a private hospital under the purview of Universiti Malaya, Norzaiton said that beyond pay, hospitals should offer benefits such as medical insurance and accommodation. “Ultimately, nurses just want work-life balance.”
Amir Firdaus Abdullah, chairman and group managing director of Aurelius Healthcare, echoed concerns about retention but argued that the best approach was simply to offer better compensation.
“When I started Gleneagles Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, we made a decision that we were going to be the best payers,” he said. “Because of that, we don’t lose many nurses. We pay well, offer bonuses, and share quite a lot with our staff.”
To address nurse poaching, Amir called for a more structured approach to salaries across the industry. “If we want to curb poaching in an open market, we all need to agree on what nurses should be paid and value them the right way.”
Beyond salary, Amir said hospitals need to rethink how they develop nurses’ careers. “When you have a good nurse manager, what hospital CEOs like me do is we promote them as managers,” he said. “But they don’t actually do very well because it’s not their forte.”
Instead, Aurelius focuses on three pathways: clinical leadership, management development, and education. “With these three streams being implemented in most hospitals, you are then able to get the best out of that particular individual and you actually listen to what they want.”
The panel also discussed Malaysia’s broader nursing shortage and the risk of repeating past mistakes. Amir cautioned against rapid expansion of nursing colleges without careful planning.
“The problem is, we’ve been here before, and I’m quite sure we’re going to repeat the same mistakes because we haven’t learned from them,” he said.
He recalled a time when the country had an oversupply of nursing graduates, leading many to take jobs outside health care. “I remember a time when there were too many nursing graduates, and they ended up working in banks, selling credit cards, doing all sorts of things outside of health care because there weren’t enough jobs.”
With Malaysia once again facing a nursing crunch, Amir warned that simply opening more colleges could backfire. “That’s why regulators like the Malaysian Nursing Board and the Malaysian Medical Council must set proper standards, govern who gets licenses to open nursing colleges, and ensure the number of institutions aligns a bit closer with the demand.”
Correction note: The 10th paragraph was amended to describe UMSC as a “private hospital under the purview of Universiti Malaya”, not the “private wing of Universiti Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC)” as originally reported. UMSC is neither registered under UMMC nor managed under UMMC’s administration.
