MMA president Dr N Ganabaskaran said Malaysia’s current healthcare facilities were generally “very old and in need of upgrades”.

He told FMT that maintenance was not properly carried out because of improper budgeting and poor foresight.

He said many facilities in rural areas of Sabah and Sarawak were “in bad shape” and added that the MMA believes many of the complaints in the survey were about healthcare facilities there.

The survey was conducted from June to November among 337 doctors from government hospitals and clinics who are members of a Facebook group.

Some 38% of the respondents rated the overall maintenance of their public health facility as “poor” or “really terrible”, while about 51% said they suffered electricity supply interruptions at least once a year while 10% said there were power cuts and water disruptions every month.

Ganabaskaran said the survey would have been better if it had attracted a larger number of the 40,000 doctors in government service.

He said the recurrent electricity supply problem reported in the survey lay with the provider and was not the fault of the hospitals themselves.

He called for a thorough check on what maintenance work is needed for public healthcare facilities in all rural areas, and for regular evaluations of the quality of maintenance and repair works.

Ganabaskaran said frequent power breakdowns could affect machines, diagnostic tools and hospital computer systems besides being a major inconvenience for staff and patients.

However, he noted that the 2020 federal budget had allocated funds for the upkeep and maintenance of government healthcare facilities, and the health minister was taking a serious view of these issues.

Ganabaskaran said upgrades of facilities should include computer systems, in order to achieve an integrated electronic medical record system being mooted by the minister.