Malaysia needs more teaching hospitals

Abstract

Hospitals in Malaysia are divided into public and private; the latter category exceeds by nearly twice. Among the public hospitals, there are also divisions into specialist, state, and district, and overlapping with those being the teaching and non-teaching hospitals. Strictly speaking, there are only three teaching hospitals, each under a medical faculty or university with the fourth (IIUM) scheduled to start operation in 2016. Teaching hospitals are under the purview of the Ministry of Higher Education. The growth in undergraduate medical education over the last decade1 sees the expansion of a new kind of hospital used for teaching where large state or district public hospitals are affiliated with both public and private medical schools for teaching purposes in addition to service provision and research for the affiliated university staffs. In this case, previously service oriented hospitals are made to function like a teaching hospital. Despite many inherent limitations, this model, used by both public and private medical schools, has been relatively successful to allow public hospitals to be used for teaching undergraduate medicine. Nowadays, we are seeing this model being stretched even further to assume more roles traditionally associated with a teaching hospital with variable and limited success. For the purposes of this editorial however, hospitals extensively used for teaching as in this model are included under teaching hospital definition and there are at least another five of them.