The health care system in Malaysia has undergone a fundamental transformation over the last two decades. This book examines this transformation and explores the pressing issues it faces today. It includes coverage of: the evolution of the system since independence, from the colonial legacy of national provision bequeathed from the British to the impact of the global ideological shift against statism in the 1980s considers the responses of the Malaysian state and government policy issues such as equity of provision, women's access to health care, HIV-AIDS health care, care for the elderly. The book offers a detailed examination of the changing face of health care in Malaysia, and its impact on Malaysian citizens, users and society.

Health systems are fluid and their components are interdependent in complex ways. Policymakers, academics and students continually endeavour to understand how to manage health systems to improve the health of populations. However, previous scholarship has often failed to engage with the intersections and interactions of health with a multitude of other systems and determinants. This book ambitiously takes on the challenge of presenting health systems as a coherent whole, by applying a systems-thinking lens. It focuses on Malaysia as a case study to demonstrate the evolution of a health system from a low-income developing status to one of the most resilient health systems today. A rich collaboration of multidisciplinary academics working with policymakers who were at the coalface of decision-making and practitioners with decades of experience, provides a candid analysis of what worked and what did not. The result is an engaging, informative and thought-provoking intervention in the debate. This title is Open Access.

The Health Systems in Transition (HiT) profiles are country-based reports that provide a detailed description of a health system and of reform and policy initiatives in progress or under development in a specific country. Each profile is produced by country experts in collaboration with an international editor. In order to facilitate comparisons between countries, the profiles are based on a common template used by the Asia Pacific and European Observatories on Health Systems and Policies. The template provides detailed guidelines and specific questions, definitions and examples needed to compile a profile.

International medical travel (IMT), people crossing national borders in the pursuit of healthcare, has become a growing phenomenon. With many of the countries currently being promoted as IMT destinations located in the ‘developing’ world, IMT poses a significant challenge to popular assumptions about who provides and receives care since it inverses and diversifies presumed directionalities of care. This book analyses the development of international medical travel in Malaysia, by looking at the benefits and challenges of providing health care to non-Malaysians. It challenges embedded assumptions about the sources, directions and political value of care. The author situates the Malaysian case study material at the fruitful cross-section of a range of literatures on transnational mobility, hospitality, therapeutic landscapes and medical diplomacy to examine their roles in the construction of national identity. The book thus contributes to wider debates that have emerged around the changing character of global health governance, and is of use to students and scholars of Southeast Asian Studies as well as Politics and Health and Social Care.

"Today Singapore ranks sixth in the world in healthcare outcomes well ahead of many developed countries, including the United States. The results are all the more significant as Singapore spends less on healthcare than any other high-income country, both as measured by fraction of the Gross Domestic Product spent on health and by costs per person. Singapore achieves these results at less than one-fourth the cost of healthcare in the United States and about half that of Western European countries. Government leaders, presidents and prime ministers, finance ministers and ministers of health, policymakers in congress and parliament, public health officials responsible for healthcare systems planning, finance and operations, as well as those working on healthcare issues in universities and think-tanks should know how this system works to achieve affordable excellence."--Publisher's website.

The health care system in Malaysia has undergone a fundamental transformation over the last two decades. This book examines this transformation and explores the pressing issues it faces today. It includes coverage of: the evolution of the system since independence, from the colonial legacy of national provision bequeathed from the British to the impact of the global ideological shift against statism in the 1980s considers the responses of the Malaysian state and government policy issues such as equity of provision, women's access to health care, HIV-AIDS health care, care for the elderly. The book offers a detailed examination of the changing face of health care in Malaysia, and its impact on Malaysian citizens, users and society.