This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 21, 2024 - October 27, 2024

During the Budget 2025 speech, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim announced the launching of Rakan KKM, a whole-of-government partnership programme to enhance Ministry of Health (MoH) hospitals and clinics for all Malaysians.

The launching of this programme reflects the prime minister’s deep commitment to ensuring that the rakyat will always have affordable access to the best healthcare available, no matter what their socioeconomic background.

In keeping with the spirit of Malaysia Madani, the higher intent of Rakan KKM is not only to raise the ceiling when it comes to the quality of public healthcare services, but also to raise the floor, so that every single patient in the public healthcare system benefits.

Under Rakan KKM, non-emergency patients will have the option to purchase “premium economy” value-added services, including personalised care, the ability to choose their specialists and additional privacy and comfort in the wards.

This partnership programme was designed with the goal of taking Malaysia’s public healthcare system to even greater heights. In achieving such heights, there are two challenges in particular that need to be innovatively addressed.

The first is the increasing number of medical specialists and other healthcare workers who are leaving public healthcare for the private sector.

The second is the availability of funds to improve and upgrade healthcare facilities and services, as well as pay our healthcare workers more.

Alongside these two challenges, the country is also experiencing high levels of inflation in the private healthcare sector. This may in turn lead to an increasing number of patients turning from the private sector to the public sector, adding a further strain on resources.

Rakan KKM is designed to robustly meet all of these challenges.

First, by providing public healthcare workers an avenue to earn more income by participating in Rakan KKM in their extra time, we increase the retention of key healthcare workers in the public healthcare system.

Second, by ensuring that a portion of its revenue is reinvested back into the public healthcare system, Rakan KKM contributes to the improvement of the public healthcare system as a whole. We can expect this to benefit the B40 especially.

Third, Rakan KKM addresses rising healthcare cost inflation by providing more value-based options for the rakyat, especially for those in the M40 segment.

In terms of pricing, Rakan KKM services are expected to be priced above cost, and below most existing private healthcare services. Rakan KKM is not designed to compete with existing luxury private healthcare services. There are also ongoing discussions with private health insurers to include Rakan KKM under their existing policies.

Rakan KKM differs from previous similar initiatives in public healthcare facilities in that first, it ensures that a greater cross section of healthcare workers can benefit directly and officially from this programme.

Second, the revenue from Rakan KKM will be reinvested directly into the hospitals in order to improve services for all, including non-Rakan KKM patients.

Rakan KKM is also designed with one key priority in mind: to never detract from the level and quality of healthcare that is currently available to the Malaysian public at its current cost.

In fact, because of the way revenue is reinvested back into the public healthcare system, Rakan KKM is designed to raise that standard of care for all to an even higher level.

In doing so, we are again aiming not only to raise the ceiling as far as the patient experience at public healthcare facilities is concerned, but also to raise the floor for every single patient.

We are able to achieve these goals via the practice of a few key operational principles.

First, Rakan KKM only applies to elective, non-emergency services. Prioritisation and access to emergency services will never be based on the ability to pay, but instead be based on clinical needs.

Second, healthcare workers are only allowed to participate in Rakan KKM services after serving their commitment to non-Rakan KKM patients.

Third, equipment and facilities used for Rakan KKM leverages untapped capacity.

These operational principles ensure that the level of service provided to regular patients in the public healthcare system will never be compromised.

Importantly, Rakan KKM is able to achieve these goals without any element of privatisation of our public healthcare services at all.

For there to be an element of privatisation, there must be private interests involved. In Rakan KKM, there are none. All investment for Rakan KKM comes from the government and from government-linked investment companies, thus keeping all the money, ownership and control under the government.

There are no private interests involved in investing, controlling or sharing revenue from Rakan KKM. Instead, all revenue is shared between the healthcare workers involved, and the public healthcare system as a whole.

Rakan KKM is intended to serve as a transformational agent to catalyse value-based healthcare throughout the ecosystem. With reinvigorated morale as well as modernised MoH hospitals and clinics, our healthcare teams will be able to provide even higher quality public healthcare for all.

Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad is the minister of health

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