Malaysia must stop asking why doctors leave and start creating reasons for them to stay. This is no longer simply a salary problem. It is a workforce design problem.
Budget 2027 should introduce an 11-point Health Care Workforce Retention Plan:
Pay for Responsibility: Review basic pay, specialist allowances and on-call rates, especially for critical specialties and high-burden services.
Reward Doctors Who Stay: Introduce retention packages at five, 10 and 15-year milestones, combining financial incentives with training and career benefits.
Fix the Promotion Bottleneck: Create a transparent, merit-based pathway to higher grades instead of making experienced doctors wait indefinitely for vacancies.
Recognise Contract Service: Preserve seniority and salary progression when contract doctors become permanent, with appropriate backdated recognition for delayed promotions or increments.
Expand Specialist Training: Give doctors in Sabah, Sarawak, and underserved areas earlier access to postgraduate training. Count rural service towards specialist pathways and career progression.
Make East Malaysia Postings Attractive: Review the fixed regional incentive and consider restoring a salary-linked structure. Add hardship allowances for genuinely difficult and remote postings.
Pay Relocation Assistance Upfront: Provide timely relocation support, furnished accommodation and essential utilities. Where quarters are unavailable, housing allowances should reflect actual rental costs.
Do Not Break Up Families Unnecessarily: Create a fair and humane appeals system for doctors with spouses, young children, elderly parents, or other legitimate family responsibilities.
Make Transfers Transparent: Publish an up-to-date vacancy and transfer dashboard by hospital, specialty, and location, allowing doctors to track applications.
Make Housemanship Structured, Supportive, and Bully-Free: Young doctors need proper supervision, respectful teaching, clear expectations, regular feedback, and safe learning opportunities. A good experience will determine how long they will stay in government service.
Offer a Long-Term Public Service Career: Consider a pension option for healthcare professionals and education incentives, such as scholarships or grants, for the children of long-serving public-sector doctors. Do not force doctors to choose between career and family.
For postings to Sabah, Sarawak, and rural areas, doctors should know the following upfront:
- A confirmed posting duration.
- Financial incentives.
- Housing and relocation support.
- What happens after completion.
- Postgraduate training opportunities.
- How to apply for transfer afterwards.
Certainty is itself an incentive. A defined period of service followed by a transparent pathway to transfer, training or the next career placement is better than an open-ended posting with no clear future.
These measures should be part of a national workforce framework, not introduced only during each crisis.
The objective is simple. Stop measuring success by how many doctors we recruit. Measure how many we retain.
Every doctor who leaves after years of training means more than a vacant post. Malaysia loses clinical experience, mentors, trainers, institutional knowledge, and future leaders.
The government cannot solve this simply by creating more posts or increasing salaries. Doctors stay when they see a career, not just a job; progression, not stagnation; support, not burnout; and security for their families.
Malaysia has invested heavily in training its doctors. Now it must invest in giving them reasons to stay.
The author is president of the Penang Medical Practitioners’ Society (PMPS).
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
