Health profiles of foreigners attending primary care clinics in Malaysia.

BACKGROUND: The world population has become more globalised with increasing number of people residing in another country for work or other reasons. Little is known about the health profiles of foreign population in Malaysia. The aim of this study was to provide a detailed description of the health problems presented by foreigners attending primary care clinics in Malaysia. METHODS: Data were derived from the 2012 National Medical Care Survey (NMCS), a cross sectional survey of primary care encounters from public and private primary care clinics sampled from five regions in Malaysia. Patients with foreign nationality were identified and analysed for demographic profiles, reasons for encounter (RFEs), diagnosis, and provision of care. RESULTS: Foreigners accounted for 7.7 % (10,830) of all patient encounters from NMCS. Most encounters were from private clinics (90.2 %). Median age was 28 years (IQR: 24.0, 34.8) and 69.9 % were male. Most visits to the primary care clinics were for symptom-based complaints (69.5 %), followed by procedures (23.0 %) and follow-up visit (7.4 %). The commonest diagnosis in public clinics was antenatal care (21.8 %), followed by high risk pregnancies (7.5 %) and upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) (6.8 %). Private clinics had more cases for general medical examination (13.5 %), URTI (13.1 %) and fever (3.9 %). Medications were prescribed to 76.5 % of these encounters. CONCLUSIONS: More foreigners were seeking primary medical care from private clinics and the encounters were for general medical examinations and acute minor ailments. Those who sought care from public clinics were for obstetric problems and chronic diseases. Medications were prescribed to two-thirds of the encounters while other interventions: laboratory investigations, medical procedures and follow-up appointment had lower rates in private clinics. Foreigners are generally of young working group and are expected to have mandatory medical checks. The preponderance of obstetrics seen in public clinics suggests a need for improved access to maternal care and pregnancy related care. This has implication on policy and health care provision and access for foreigners and future studies are needed to look into strategies to solve these problems.

Missed Appointments at a Child Development Centre and Barriers to Access Special Needs Services for Children in Klang Valley, Malaysia: A Mixed Methods Study.

Attending appointments is vital for children with special needs, as such appointments involve long-term interdisciplinary care to ensure continuity of care and improve health and well-being. This study was performed to determine the prevalence of missed clinic appointments and identify the factors among those who have ever missed appointments and barriers of access to children's special needs services at the Child Development Centre (CDC) at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre (UKMMC). Moreover, suggestions for improvement from the caregivers' perspectives were explored. This is an explanatory sequential mixed methods study among caregivers of children with developmental disabilities aged up to 17 years old. Of 197 caregivers, 62 (31.5%) had missed clinic appointments. Forgetfulness was the most frequently cited reason. The bi-variable analysis showed significant differences in missed appointment rates by gender of caregivers and duration of follow-up. The final logistic regression model demonstrated that, when combined with the effect of being a male caregiver as an independent variable, follow-up duration of more than 6 years increased 2.67 times the risk of missing an appointment. Caregivers' perceived barriers were transportation, caregiver, child and healthcare services factors. Policies and strategic plans should be focused on key findings from these factors to improve appointment adherence and accessibility to services for children with special needs.

Recruitment and participation of a survey in a public-private primary care setting: experience from the QUALICOPC Malaysia.

AIM: The purpose of this paper is to describe the recruitment strategies, the response rates and the reasons for non-response of Malaysian public and private primary care doctors in an international survey on the quality, cost and equity in primary care. BACKGROUND: Low research participation by primary care doctors, especially those working in the private sector, is a challenge to quality benchmarking. METHODS: Primary care doctors were sampled through multi-stage sampling. The first stage-sampling unit was the primary care clinics, which were randomly sampled from five states in Malaysia to reflect their proportions in two strata - sector (public/private) and location (urban/rural). Strategies through endorsement, personalised invitation, face-to-face interview and non-monetary incentives were used to recruit public and private doctors. Data collection was carried out by fieldworkers through structured questionnaires. FINDINGS: A total of 221 public and 239 private doctors participated in the study. Among the public doctors, 99.5% response rates were obtained. Among the private doctors, a 32.8% response rate was obtained. Totally, 30% of private clinics were uncontactable by telephone, and when these were excluded, the overall response rate is 46.8%. The response rate of the private clinics across the states ranges from 31.5% to 34.0%. A total of 167 answered the non-respondent questionnaire. Among the non-respondents, 77.4 % were male and 22.6% female (P = 0.011). There were 33.6% of doctors older than 65 years (P = 0.003) and 15.9% were from the state of Sarawak (P = 0.016) when compared to non-respondents. Reason for non-participation included being too busy (51.8%), not interested (32.9%), not having enough patients (9.1%) and did not find it beneficial (7.9%). Our study demonstrated the feasibility of obtaining favourable response rate in a survey involving doctors from public and private primary care settings.

Chasm in primary care provision in a universal health system: Findings from a nationally representative survey of health facilities in Malaysia.

BACKGROUND: Malaysia has achieved universal health coverage since 1980s through the expansion of direct public provision, particularly in rural areas. However, no systematic examination of the rural-urban distribution of primary care services and resources has been conducted to date for policy impact evaluation. METHODS: We conducted a national cross-sectional survey of 316 public and 597 private primary care clinics, selected through proportionate stratified random sampling, from June 2011 through February 2012. Using a questionnaire developed based on the World Health Organization toolkits on monitoring health systems strengthening, we examined the availability of primary care services/resources and the associations between service/resource availability and clinic ownership, locality, and patient load. Data were weighted for all analyses to account for the complex survey design and produce unbiased national estimates. RESULTS: Private primary care clinics and doctors outnumbered their public counterparts by factors of 5.6 and 3.9, respectively, but the private clinics were significantly less well-equipped with basic facilities and provided a more limited range of services. Per capita densities of primary care clinics and workforce were higher in urban areas (2.2 clinics and 15.1 providers per 10,000 population in urban areas versus 1.1 clinics and 11.7 providers per 10,000 population in rural areas). Within the public sector, the distribution of health services and resources was unequal and strongly favored the urban clinics. Regression analysis revealed that rural clinics had lower availability of services and resources after adjusting for ownership and patient load, but the associations were not significant except for workforce availability (adjusted odds ratio [OR]: 0.82; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.71-0.96). CONCLUSIONS: Targeted primary care expansion in rural areas could be an effective first step towards achieving universal health coverage, especially in countries with limited healthcare resources. Nonetheless, geographic expansion alone is inadequate to achieve effective coverage in a dichotomous primary care system, and the role of the private sector in primary care delivery should not be overlooked.