KUALA LUMPUR, June 8 — The Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) has questioned how the government plans to provide staffing for a 500-bed Petaling Jaya (PJ) Hospital project amid workforce shortages.
The doctors’ group pointed out that the public sector is short of nearly 11,000 specialist doctors, only one in 10 took up housemanship positions this year, and nursing vacancies stand at around 18 per cent (roughly 14,700 unfilled posts out of 84,000).
“Our hospitals are not short of demand. They are short of staff,” MMA president Dr R. Arasu said in a statement today.
“We have already watched this happen. Pasir Gudang Hospital was completed and handed over, then could not open fully because there were not enough doctors and nurses to run it safely. That is not a failure of construction. It is a failure of workforce planning.”
MMA noted that Petaling Jaya alone, with an 800,000 size population in the state of Selangor, has 12 private hospitals with more than 1,400 beds, and over 450 registered private clinics.
“That capacity can be bought. The mechanism already exists — the Health Ministry has shortlisted nearly a hundred private hospitals willing to take public patients for services like cardiology, nephrology and radiology imaging. Expand it.”
MMA also called for increased funding for Malaysia’s health care digitalisation plans.
“The Ministry’s Digital Health Division is fixing this, with primary care set to be fully digital by 2027 and one national record that public and private facilities can both read. Once a patient’s record follows them, someone stuck six months on a scan waiting list can be sent to a clinic down the road and seen the following week, with the government footing the bill, setting the standard, keeping the record,” said Dr Arasu.
“No new building. No new land. This is not a favour to the private sector. It is a quicker answer for the patient, and mature systems like Australia’s have done it for years.”
He further demanded the establishment of an independent Health Service Commission “so that hiring, posting and career progression are no longer hostage to a civil service structure never built for health care.”
MMA’s concerns about staffing for a new PJ hospital mirror other medical doctors who have similarly said the government shouldn’t be building new hospitals without accounting for workforce needs.
