Malaysia is all planned to establish a nation’s maiden flagship medical tourism hospital with government-linked company (GLC) medical centres. The shortlisted hospitals were Sunway Medical Centre, National Heart Institute (IJN), Mahkota Medical Centre, Island Hospital, Gleneagles Penang, KPJ Ampang Puteri, Thomson Hospital Kota Damansara, Ramsay Sime Darby Subang Jaya Medical Centre, and Prince Court Medical Centre.
The names of the shortlisted hospitals were given by the Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng who declared the names in the Medical Travel Market Intelligence Conference organised by Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC). Also, the hospitals that come under government linked company are Prince Court, Gleneagles, KPJ, IJN and Subang Jaya Medical Centre. KPJ Healthcare Bhd is the health care arm of Johor state-owned conglomerate Johor Corporation, whereas Ramsay Sime Darby Health Care is a 50:50 joint venture by Sime Darby Berhad, a GLC.
In the Medical Travel Market Intelligence Conference Lim said “To show our commitment in further supporting the industry’s growth and sustainability, we will look into acknowledging qualified Malaysian private hospitals who are establishing themselves as flagship hospitals for healthcare travel,”
Lim added “We have established a joint steering committee to approve investments, chaired jointly by myself, and Minister of International Trade and Industry, Darrell Leiking,”.
“Where previously, for all foreign as well as domestic investments will take at least six to nine months to get final approval, this will be approved on a monthly basis.”
To tag along with the proceedings the minister also focused around and announced that the government has created a joint committee to increase investments into the health care sector. According to Lim, the government’s commitment to the private health care industry through investment tax allowance and incentives has attracted almost RM10 billion in private investments in 2018, of which more than RM1 billion was from foreign direct investments and more than RM8 billion from local investment.
According to the recent statistics, Malaysia has outperformed the global and regional growth rates in the health care industry with a 17 percent increase in revenue from 2015 to 2018. Lim said, “In 2018 alone, revenue receipts reached RM1.5 billion from approximately 1.2 million health care traveller arrivals,”.
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