KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 23 — Most surgeons registered on the National Specialist Register (NSR) across eight specialties, except trauma, are practising outside the Ministry of Health (MOH), new data has shown.
According to data presented by MOH’s national head of surgical services Dr Ahmad Shanwani Mohamed Sidek at the Ipoh Surgical Symposium 2025 in Ipoh, Perak, last Saturday, the vast majority of surgeons practise outside the government health service, except the nation’s nine trauma surgeons who are all in the MOH.
(Trauma is a new subspecialty that has yet to get onto the NSR).
The proportion of surgeons in the MOH based on Dr Ahmad Shanwani’s presentation slide, as sighted by CodeBlue, are as follows:
- Trauma: 100 per cent
- General surgeons: 33 per cent
- Thoracic: 30 per cent
- Upper gastrointestinal (GI): 28 per cent
- Breast and endocrine: 27 per cent
- Hepatobiliary: 25 per cent
- Colorectal: 20 per cent
- Vascular: 17 per cent
MOH is the biggest health care provider in the country. Other providers include university hospitals and Ministry of Defence (Mindef) hospitals, as well as the private sector.
In July 2024, Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad told the Dewan Negara in a written parliamentary reply that 917 specialist doctors resigned from the MOH between 2019 and 2023, including those in surgical fields like general surgery, neurosurgery, plastic surgery, and urological surgery.
The number of specialists who quit MOH increased by 57 per cent from 229 resignations in 2019 to 359 in 2023.
CodeBlue previously reported 2022 data that showed the public health care sector is estimated to be short of nearly 11,000 specialists and that the public service only has 44 per cent of specialists needed this year. These include deficits of over 900 specialists in general surgery.
