Malaysia Private Healthcare Sector Case Study Analysis

Introduction

Human capital and health improvement programme are great concern towards development and economics growth in any country. In South East Asia, Malaysia appears to have one of the best healthcare programs for its citizens. Like most other countries, Malaysia has a dual tiered system of healthcare; one which is led by the government and funded by taxpayers and the other one is private sector, for example- KPJ Healthcare Berhad. Working life cause stress to everyone in the world. Especially healthcare workers, they experience a high pressure while performing their duties. They perform crucial roles in providing diagnosis, treatment and management of the patient care. Stress that happens to them also contributed by other reasons such as high job demand, low decision authority, supervisor support and others.

Doctors are exposed to high levels of stress in the course of their profession and are particularly susceptible to experiencing burnout. Doctors experiencing burnout are reported to be at a higher risk of making poor decisions such as display a hostile attitude to their patients, make more medical errors, have difficult relationships with colleagues and others. Burnout among doctors also increases the risk of depression, anxiety, insomnia, tiredness, alcohol and drug abuse, and the most serious incident is suicide. Doctors career pathways is to have provisional registration with Malaysian Medical Council on graduating from medical school until successful completion of 2 years house officer training. After this 2 years house officer training, doctors still have to proceed with additional 2 years compulsory service as medical officers with government hospitals. There are only 20 percent of them will undertake 4 years for further specialist training. Then they will continue to work with public or private healthcare sectors. This process involves many internal and external factors such as time, mental burnout, academic fee, government management and others. This will cause the shortage of employment in doctor and medical assistants that affect the recruitment in KPJ Healthcare Berhad. Salary is an incredibly sensitive topic in the workplace, and as someone else will thinks they’re being underpaid, they’re likely feeling unfair and emotional. We now live in a world where salary measurement can be founded through online. Wage comparison websites, job listings and discussions on social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook are all capable of brings employees to the conclusion that they’re not paid enough according to market. This is particularly troublesome, because if the internet is famed for one thing, it is a difference of opinion and questionable sources of facts. Fair and equitable of salary would be consider by company performance and also employees’ qualification that are not being too much differences from market supply.

Problem Analysis

The main problem of human resource management in this organization is staff benefits. One of them is the salary issue. This is an important issue as an employee value the most that how much the employer can pay them and also how much they can demand. Nowadays cost of living rise continuously, employees expect for more pay in order to cover themselves and their families. Money is a useful tool as it can solve most of the problem in this world. In Jobstreet, the company reviews of KPJ Healthcare Berhad showed the employees reflected that the salary scale did not commensurate with employees’ experience, qualifications and labour market supply. Management issue are the greatest onus with this place as it work as the Group. It has small local minds running the establishment and cannot make important decisions, they overcomplicate things with hierarchy and bureaucracy. The voice of many are not made heard and suggestions thrown under the carpet. There is no space for critically thinking or proactive people who want to make a difference. As KPJ Healthcare Berhad is exist upon supporting the operation of its group of hospitals, a lot of organization, system alignment is still going on. Hence, changes happen quite rapidly. Yet the organization is still expanding and straightening their internal organization especially in corporate level. In such case, the layers of approval may takes a long way. In Malaysia, patients usually cannot choose physician of their choice because most of the doctors and nurses have heavy working schedules.

Therefore, patients that receive treatment is capable to pay a higher medical bills. The fact is even though KPJ Healthcare Berhad has been given the approval to run the medical degree programmes, it was denied due to technical matters. The Ministry of Higher Education and the council was the view that Malaysia should fulfil the shortage for specialists or post-graduate medical degrees. According to Dr Ravindran R Naidu, the President of Malaysian Medical Association (MMA), there are around 5,000 of medical graduates in local each year, waiting to be admitted to government hospitals. However, he stated that these medical graduates are often forced to wait between nine months to a year. While waiting for jobs to be distributed, these young doctors only can take other jobs. They normally working as a driver for Grab car or working as a part-time at KFC besides as a doctors’. He said he was sad by the fact that the doctors who are still unemployed after graduation, could not been hired by government hospitals at a time. This is not a healthy phenomenon for Malaysia in the field of medical profession. To address this, he points out that government hospitals will be able to take in only 40 to 50 percents of the best performed doctors four years from now and turn them into full-time doctos. In response, Dr Ravindran called on the government and the Ministry of Health to take a serious look at the issue and find effective solutions. Based on the above issue, problem shortage in recruitment of experienced doctors in KPJ happens. Furthermore, another issue related is health and safety of employees in KPJ. A study was done among the medical students in Malaysia showed that they are suffered from high stress than other faculties’ students. The stress among Malaysian’s medical students was as high as 56 percent which is alarming. Example, doctors or other medical employees would probably have to stay 24 hours on call in order to fill up the job positions when a big incident happens. In other word, employees may not get enough rest. Bringing along their exhausted physic and mental to workplace, overworked just to perform and complete their job tasks.

Point Of Views

Human resource department plays an important role in a business because this department deals with every issue that related to employees such as requests and compliance in daily basis. When issues occurs, it will delay the effectiveness and efficiency of employees. Business can no longer expand due to the undesirability performance of the employees. I suggest the manager of KPJ’s human resource department to look serious into these issue that I mentioned above yet it can effect company performance. Manager should increase employees’ job satisfaction by evaluating productivity at company practices, procedures and also resource. Besides that, employees should be given training periodically not only physically but also mentally. This is important to ensure that KPJ’s staff can fully undertake their job scope and done it perfectly. The training focus on their mental can help employee to withstand the stress that they faced in workplace. At the same time, employees’ health should also be in the consideration. On the other hand, regarding to the salary issue, manager can meet the unhappy employee privately and hear their side of the story, understanding the problems and difficulties that they are facing through. Starting by letting them to speak, listen to them and take notes with it.

Conclusion

What I have learnt is Malaysia is highly committed in transforming private healthcare sector to assist the country towards a high income society. Malaysia needs to get out from middle income trap, and private healthcare sector is one of the key to hit the target. Malaysia is an multi-languages country, more welcoming towards foreigners, multi‐cultured, multi‐racial, and open its doors widely, sometimes too wide, to the world. Malaysia will achieve what it aims for; to make Malaysia a medical tourism hub, with all the consequences. However, Malaysia should ensure working conditions of all healthcare practitioners are conducive, to support the appeal of healthcare sector through harmonious workplace relations. The Malaysian government has also encouraged private hospitals to take on more social responsibility of the country and the private sectors are responding well to this. Over the last couple of years, there has been an increase in efforts to improve systems and attract foreign workforce. With the Tenth Malaysian Plan in place, it is hoped that the mechanisms set by the government will improve the situation.