KUALA LUMPUR, July 31 — The Public Service Department (JPA) has approved the creation of 13,343 new positions without trade-offs for the Ministry of Health (MOH) across various service schemes and grades.
The positions were created to support the operations of 256 new and upgraded health care facilities, incurring financial implications of RM1.25 billion annually.
Out of the 13,343 new positions, 7,218 are for five main service schemes in the MOH: 1,197 medical officers, 239 dental officers, 339 pharmacy officers, 3,471 nurses, and 1,972 assistant medical officers, whereas the remaining 6,125 positions are in other service schemes.
“With this approval, JPA has created 66,312 new positions without trade-offs for the MOH since 2019, thus strengthening the capacity of the country’s health care system to meet rising needs,” JPA said in a statement yesterday.
The creation of new positions in the health service doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will be filled.
With MOH’s new “absolute autonomy” to manage its approved health care posts, the ministry is in fact now burdened with the responsibility of not just filling the 13,000 over new positions, but also reducing attrition rates to curb vacancies of existing positions.
Nationwide, MOH reported 15,587 vacancies for nurses as of last March 31. Creating another 3,471 positions means that the ministry needs to hire 19,058 nurses.
Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad told the Dewan Negara recently that the nursing diploma intake at ILKKM was increased to 3,000 trainees in 2025.
However, Senator Dr RA Lingeshwaran noted that these trainees will only join the workforce after three years of study. Only 479 ILKKM graduates will be processed for permanent appointments this September.
This means that it will likely take at least eight years for seven batches of 3,000 nursing trainees each to fill some 19,000 positions by 2034, without taking into account resignations of experienced nurses that would create additional vacancies in that period.
The no-show rate for permanent appointments of medical officers jumped from 20 per cent in 2023 to 40 per cent in 2025 nationwide and is projected by the MOH to continue rising to a whopping 50 per cent this year, at least for Sabah.
MOH also reported high vacancy rates in Sarawak as of last June 30: medical officers (30 per cent), specialists (28 per cent), and nurses (15 per cent).
In terms of absolute numbers, nurses had the highest vacancies in the state at 1,226 vacant nursing positions, followed by 931 vacancies for medical officers.
