Kota Kinabalu: Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad said whether Sabah should regain the health powers it used to hold under Article 95B is being discussed under the Malaysia Agreement 1963 (MA63) health negotiations.
He said this during a media conference in response to a question about whether his Ministry supported revisiting Sabah’s former devolved health powers and granting autonomy to the State.
“This is exactly what is now in the five subcommittees. At the technical level, our top officers are now discussing it,” he said, adding that the recommendations reached would be brought up to the ministers who sit on the joint committee.
He said the matter falls under the first of the five subcommittees, which focuses on health autonomy.
“We are really seriously looking into that. It is work in progress,” he said.
Asked what other matters were being looked into apart from the autonomy issue, Dzulkefly said the five subcommittees were also examining overlapping authority between the State and Federal governments, particularly regarding Sabah’s health ordinance, which he said needed to be harmonised.
He said staffing, placement, training and facilities were also under discussion.
“It covers almost the whole range, end to end, of the supply side and services, including regulation, so that we can harmonise all of it,” he said.
Additionally, he said the number of doctors entering housemanship nationwide had dropped by almost half since 2018, from more than 6,000 to about 3,000.
Dzulkefly was responding to a question on the shortage of doctors in Sabah, which has been reported to run as high as 6,000 vacancies. He said the drop in supply is a legacy issue.
“There is a reduction of almost 50 per cent on the supply side. In my first term in 2018, I had about 6,000 doctors who graduated into housemanship. Now I only have 3,000 over,” he said.
He said his Ministry was also facing a shortage of more than 10,000 nurses, though he was not certain of the exact figure for medical officers.
He said the Public Service Department had given the Health Ministry the mandate to directly manage the placement and distribution of doctors, nurses and other scheme-of-service staff.
He said this would help reduce bureaucracy in postings that had previously affected the process, with the matter overseen by the Public Service Department.
