Public and private sectors collective response to combat COVID-19 in Malaysia.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Tan, Ching Siang Lokman, Saim Rao, Yao Kok, Szu Hua Ming, Long Chiau
Abstract	Over the last year, the dangerous severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread rapidly around the world. Malaysia has not been excluded from this COVID-19 pandemic. The resurgence of COVID-19 cases has overwhelmed the public healthcare system and overloaded the healthcare resources. Ministry of Health (MOH) Malaysia has adopted an Emergency Ordinance (EO) to instruct private hospitals to receive both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients to reduce the strain on public facilities. The treatment of COVID-19 patients at private hospitals could help to boost the bed and critical care occupancy. However, with the absence of insurance coverage because COVID-19 is categorised as pandemic-related diseases, there are some challenges and opportunities posed by the treatment fees management. Another major issue in the collaboration between public and private hospitals is the willingness of private medical consultants to participate in the management of COVID-19 patients, because medical consultants in private hospitals in Malaysia are not hospital employees, but what are termed “private contractors” who provide patient care services to the hospitals. Other collaborative measures with private healthcare providers, e.g. tele-conferencing by private medical clinics to monitor COVID-19 patients and the rollout of national vaccination programme. The public and private healthcare partnership must be enhanced, and continue to find effective ways to collaborate further to combat the pandemic. The MOH, private healthcare sectors and insurance providers need to have a synergistic COVID-19 treatment plans to ensure public as well as insurance policy holders have equal opportunities for COVID-19 screening tests, vaccinations and treatment.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC8091142&blobtype=pdf
Journal	Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice [J Pharm Policy Pract]
Volume Number	14
DOI	10.1186/s40545-021-00322-x
PubMed Central reference number	PMC8091142
Issue Number	1
PubMed reference number	33941265
e-ISSN	20523211
Language	English
Publisher	BioMed Central
Publisher Date	2021-05-03
Publisher Place	London
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. © The Author(s) 2021
Subject Keyword	Ministry of Health Malaysia Private healthcare sectors Insurance providers COVID-19 Collaborative measures
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Health Policy Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics Pharmacy