Displaying publications 41 - 60 of 111 in total

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  1. Solidarity by demand? Exit and voice in international medical travel - the case of Indonesia
    Ormond M
    Soc Sci Med, 2015 Jan;124:305-12.
    PMID: 24947552 DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.007
    Globally, more patients are intentionally travelling abroad as consumers for medical care. However, while scholars have begun to examine international medical travel's (IMT) impacts on the people and places that receive medical travellers, study of its impacts on medical travellers' home contexts has been negligible and largely speculative. While proponents praise IMT's potential to make home health systems more responsive to the needs of market-savvy healthcare consumers, critics identify it as a way to further de-politicise the satisfaction of healthcare needs. This article draws from work on political consumerism, health advocacy and social movements to argue for a reframing of IMT not as a 'one-off' statement about or an event external to struggles over access, rights and recognition within medical travellers' home health systems but rather as one of a range of critical forms of on-going engagement embedded within these struggles. To do this, the limited extant empirical work addressing domestic impacts of IMT is reviewed and a case study of Indonesian medical travel to Malaysia is presented. The case study material draws from 85 interviews undertaken in 2007-08 and 2012 with Indonesian and Malaysian respondents involved in IMT as care recipients, formal and informal care-providers, intermediaries, promoters and policy-makers. Evidence from the review and case study suggests that IMT may effect political and social change within medical travellers' home contexts at micro and macro levels by altering the perspectives, habits, expectations and accountability of, and complicity among, medical travellers, their families, communities, formal and informal intermediaries, and medical providers both within and beyond the container of the nation-state. Impacts are conditioned by the ideological foundations underpinning home political and social systems, the status of a medical traveller's ailment or therapy, and the existence of organised support for recognition and management of these in the home context.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  2. A doctor's duty is to heal the unhealthy: the story of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad
    Ong HT
    Ann Acad Med Singap, 2005 Jul;34(6):45C-51C.
    PMID: 16010379
    Mahathir Mohamad was born in 1925 in Alor Star, Kedah. He entered the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore in 1947 and graduated in 1953. His years in the medical school equipped young Mahathir with the training necessary to assess and diagnose a problem, before dispensing the appropriate treatment. Throughout his later years in the political limelight, Dr Mahathir recognised the very important role the medical college had in laying the strong foundation for his successful career. He joined UMNO in 1945, already interested in politics at the tender age of 20; he was first elected into Parliament in 1964. The vigorous expression of his candid views did not go down well during the troubled days following the 13 May 1969 racial riots and he was expelled from UMNO, his writings were banned, and he was considered a racial extremist. Nevertheless, his intellectual and political influence could not be ignored for long; he returned to Parliament in 1974, and became the fourth, and longest serving, Prime Minister of Malaysia in 1981. Dr Mahathir has found fame as a Malay statesman, and an important Asian leader of the twentieth century with much written, locally and internationally, debating his policies. This article, using Dr Mahathir's own writings, starts with his description of his early life, proceeds to look at his medical career, then touches on his diagnosis of the problems plaguing the Malays, before concluding with his views on the need to stand up to the prejudices and pressures of the Western world. Throughout his life, Dr Mahathir behaved as the ever-diligent medical doctor, constantly studying the symptoms to diagnose the cause of the ills in his community and country, before proceeding to prescribe the correct treatment to restore good health. It is a measure of his integrity and intellectual capability that he did not seek to hide his failures, or cite unfinished work in an attempt to cling to political power.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  3. Sir Neil Hamilton Fairley, drug resistant malaria and the myth of massive infection in Malaya 1947-63
    O'Keefe BG
    Occas Pap Med Hist Aust, 1990;4:201-19.
    PMID: 11622898
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  4. Fulltext Just Say No to the TPP: A Democratic Setback for American and Asian Public Health Comment on "The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Is It Everything We Feared for Health?"
    Muntaner C, Mahabir DF
    Int J Health Policy Manag, 2017 07 01;6(7):419-421.
    PMID: 28812839 DOI: 10.15171/ijhpm.2016.145
    (TPP) policy and the severe threats to public health that it implies for 12 Pacific Rim populations from the Americas and Asia (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam). With careful and analytic precision the authors convincingly unearth many aspects of this piece of legislation that undermine the public health achievements of most countries involved in the TTP. Our comments complement their policy analysis with the aim of providing a positive heuristic tool to assist in the understanding of the TPP, and other upcoming treaties like the even more encompassing Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and in so doing motivate the public health community to oppose the implementation of the relevant provisions of the agreements. The aims of this commentary on the study of Labonté et al are to show that an understanding of the health effects of the TPP is incomplete without a political analysis of policy formation, and that realist methods can be useful to uncover the mechanisms underlying TPP's political and policy processes.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  5. The place of health and the health of place: dengue fever and urban governance in Putrajaya, Malaysia
    Mulligan K, Elliott SJ, Schuster-Wallace C
    Health Place, 2012 May;18(3):613-20.
    PMID: 22310527 DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2012.01.001
    This case study investigates the connections among urban planning, governance and dengue fever in an emerging market context in the Global South. Key informant interviews were conducted with leading figures in public health, urban planning and governance in the planned city of Putrajaya, Malaysia. Drawing on theories of urban political ecology and ecosocial epidemiology, the qualitative study found the health of place - expressed as dengue-bearing mosquitoes and dengue fever in human bodies in the urban environment - was influenced by the place of health in a hierarchy of urban priorities.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  6. Health care reform and changes: the Malaysian experience
    Merican MI, bin Yon R
    Asia Pac J Public Health, 2002;14(1):17-22.
    PMID: 12597513
    Health care reform is an intentional, sustained and systematic process of structural change to one or more health subsystems to improve efficiency, effectiveness, patient choices and equity. Health care all over the world is continuously reforming with time. Health care reform has become an increasingly important agenda for policy change in both developed and developing countries including Malaysia. This paper provides an overview of the Malaysian health care system, its achievements, and issues and challenges leading to ongoing reform towards a more efficient and equitable health care system that possess a better quality of life for the population.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  7. Science in Malaysia: Challenge for the world s oldest prime minister
    Meo SA
    J Pak Med Assoc, 2018 Oct;68(10):1427-1428.
    PMID: 30317335
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  8. Fulltext Global health security and the health-security nexus: principles, politics and praxis
    McCoy D, Roberts S, Daoudi S, Kennedy J
    BMJ Glob Health, 2023 Sep;8(9).
    PMID: 37748796 DOI: 10.1136/bmjgh-2023-013067
    The past four decades have seen a steady rise of references to 'security' by health academics, policy-makers and practitioners, particularly in relation to threats posed by infectious disease pandemics. Yet, despite an increasingly dominant health security discourse, the many different ways in which health and security issues and actors intersect have remained largely unassessed and unpacked in current critical global health scholarship. This paper discusses the emerging and growing health-security nexus in the wake of COVID-19 and the international focus on global health security. In recognising the contested and fluid concept of health security, this paper presents two contrasting approaches to health security: neocolonial health security and universal health security. Building from this analysis, we present a novel heuristic that delineates the multiple intersections and entanglements between health and security actors and agendas to broaden our conceptualisation of global health security configurations and practices and to highlight the potential for harmful unintended consequences, the erosion of global health norms and values, and the risk of health actors being co-opted by the security sector.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  9. [Malay women as producers and managers]
    Massard J
    Tiers Monde, 1985 4 1;26(102):359-70.
    PMID: 12340322
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  10. The environmental Kuznets curve in the presence of corruption in developing countries
    Masron TA, Subramaniam Y
    Environ Sci Pollut Res Int, 2018 May;25(13):12491-12506.
    PMID: 29464597 DOI: 10.1007/s11356-018-1473-9
    Environmental degradation is at an alarming level in developing economies. The present paper examines the direct and indirect impacts of corruption on environmental deterioration using the panel data of 64 developing countries. Adopting the generalized method of moments (GMM) technique, the paper finds evidence that corruption exhibits a positive impact on pollution. Subsequently, there is also evidence indicating that the level of pollution tends to be higher in countries with a higher level of corruption, eliminating the effectiveness of income effect on environmental preservation. These results also suggest that environmental degradation is monotonically increasing with higher corruption and invalidate the presence of the EKC. Hence, a policy focuses that an anti-corruption particularly in the environmental and natural resources sector needs to be emphasized and enforced in order to reduce or possibly to totally eliminate the rent for corruption.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  11. Political economy and politics of gender: maternal and child health in colonial Malaya
    Manderson L
    ISBN: 0-7315-0720-7
    Citation: Manderson L. Political economy and politics of gender: maternal and child health in colonial Malaya. In: Cohen P, Purcall J (editors). The Political Economy of Primary Health Care in Southeast Asia. Canberra: Australian Development Studies Network an ASEAN Training Centre for Primary Health Care Development; 1989, p79-100
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  12. Public health developments in colonial Malaya: colonialism and the politics of prevention
    Manderson L
    Am J Public Health, 1999 Jan;89(1):102-7.
    PMID: 9987478
    In both African and Asian colonies until the late 19th century, colonial medicine operated pragmatically to meet the medical needs first of colonial officers and troops, immigrant settlers, and laborers responsible for economic development, then of indigenous populations when their ill health threatened the well-being of the expatriate population. Since the turn of the century, however, the consequences of colonial expansion and development for indigenous people's health had become increasingly apparent, and disease control and public health programs were expanded in this light. These programs increased government surveillance of populations at both community and household levels. As a consequence, colonial states extended institutional oversight and induced dependency through public health measures. Drawing on my own work on colonial Malaya, I illustrate developments in public health and their links to the moral logic of colonialism and its complementarity to the political economy.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  13. The Singapore years and subsequently
    Mahathir M
    Ann Acad Med Singap, 2005 Jul;34(6):42C-44C.
    PMID: 16010378
    Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad was a medical student at the King Edward VII College of Medicine from 1947 to 1953. He described his student days with fondness; he made many friends while he was at the College. He recounted his early days as a doctor before he entered politics in 1964. He became the fourth and longest serving Prime Minister of Malaysia for 22 years from 1981 to 2003. He concluded "The contribution of my Medical College days in Singapore to the racial harmony, peace and prosperity of Malaysia is tangible but unquantifiable."
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  14. Migration and Singapore: implications for the Asia Pacific
    Low L
    Asian Pac Migr J, 1994;3(2-3):251-63.
    PMID: 12289774
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  15. Silver linings: a qualitative study of desirable changes to cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic
    Lombe D, Sullivan R, Caduff C, Ali Z, Bhoo-Pathy N, Cleary J, et al.
    Ecancermedicalscience, 2021;15:1202.
    PMID: 33889211 DOI: 10.3332/ecancer.2021.1202
    Introduction: Public health emergencies and crises such as the current COVID-19 pandemic can accelerate innovation and place renewed focus on the value of health interventions. Capturing important lessons learnt, both positive and negative, is vital. We aimed to document the perceived positive changes (silver linings) in cancer care that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and identify challenges that may limit their long-term adoption.

    Methods: This study employed a qualitative design. Semi-structured interviews (n = 20) were conducted with key opinion leaders from 14 countries. The participants were predominantly members of the International COVID-19 and Cancer Taskforce, who convened in March 2020 to address delivery of cancer care in the context of the pandemic. The Framework Method was employed to analyse the positive changes of the pandemic with corresponding challenges to their maintenance post-pandemic.

    Results: Ten themes of positive changes were identified which included: value in cancer care, digital communication, convenience, inclusivity and cooperation, decentralisation of cancer care, acceleration of policy change, human interactions, hygiene practices, health awareness and promotion and systems improvement. Impediments to the scale-up of these positive changes included resource disparities and variation in legal frameworks across regions. Barriers were largely attributed to behaviours and attitudes of stakeholders.

    Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to important value-based innovations and changes for better cancer care across different health systems. The challenges to maintaining/implementing these changes vary by setting. Efforts are needed to implement improved elements of care that evolved during the pandemic.

    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  16. Fulltext Letter from Malaysia
    Loh LC
    Respirology, 2018 12;23(12):1198-1199.
    PMID: 30084515 DOI: 10.1111/resp.13382
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  17. Politicians must heed health effects of climate change
    Lim V, Stubbs JW, Nahar N, Amarasena N, Chaudry ZU, Weng SCK, et al.
    Lancet, 2009 Sep 19;374(9694):973.
    PMID: 19762076 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61641-X
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  18. Fulltext Priority-setting to integrate sexual and reproductive health into universal health coverage: the case of Malaysia
    Lim SC, Yap YC, Barmania S, Govender V, Danhoundo G, Remme M
    Sex Reprod Health Matters, 2020 Dec;28(2):1842153.
    PMID: 33236973 DOI: 10.1080/26410397.2020.1842153
    Despite increasing calls to integrate and prioritise sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in universal health coverage (UHC) processes, several SRH services have remained a low priority in countries' UHC plans. This study aims to understand the priority-setting process of SRH interventions in the context of UHC, drawing on the Malaysian experience. A realist evaluation framework was adopted to examine the priority-setting process for three SRH tracer interventions: pregnancy, safe delivery and post-natal care; gender-based violence (GBV) services; and abortion-related services. The study used a qualitative multi-method design, including a literature and document review, and 20 in-depth key informant interviews, to explore the context-mechanism-outcome configurations that influenced and explained the priority-setting process. Four key advocacy strategies were identified for the effective prioritisation of SRH services, namely: (1) generating public demand and social support, (2) linking SRH issues with public agendas or international commitments, (3) engaging champions that are internal and external to the public health sector, and (4) reframing SRH issues as public health issues. While these strategies successfully triggered mechanisms, such as mutual understanding and increased buy-in of policymakers to prioritise SRH services, the level and extent of prioritisation was affected by both inner and outer contextual factors, in particular the socio-cultural and political context. Priority-setting is a political decision-making process that reflects societal values and norms. Efforts to integrate SRH services in UHC processes need both to make technical arguments and to find strategies to overcome barriers related to societal values (including certain socio-cultural and religious norms). This is particularly important for sensitive SRH services, like GBV and safe abortion, and for certain populations.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics
  19. Fulltext Estimating direct and spill-over impacts of political elections on COVID-19 transmission using synthetic control methods
    Lim JT, Maung K, Tan ST, Ong SE, Lim JM, Koo JR, et al.
    PLoS Comput Biol, 2021 May;17(5):e1008959.
    PMID: 34043622 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008959
    Mass gathering events have been identified as high-risk environments for community transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Empirical estimates of their direct and spill-over effects however remain challenging to identify. In this study, we propose the use of a novel synthetic control framework to obtain causal estimates for direct and spill-over impacts of these events. The Sabah state elections in Malaysia were used as an example for our proposed methodology and we investigate the event's spatial and temporal impacts on COVID-19 transmission. Results indicate an estimated (i) 70.0% of COVID-19 case counts within Sabah post-state election were attributable to the election's direct effect; (ii) 64.4% of COVID-19 cases in the rest of Malaysia post-state election were attributable to the election's spill-over effects. Sensitivity analysis was further conducted by examining epidemiological pre-trends, surveillance efforts, varying synthetic control matching characteristics and spill-over specifications. We demonstrate that our estimates are not due to pre-existing epidemiological trends, surveillance efforts, and/or preventive policies. These estimates highlight the potential of mass gatherings in one region to spill-over into an outbreak of national scale. Relaxations of mass gathering restrictions must therefore be carefully considered, even in the context of low community transmission and enforcement of safe distancing guidelines.
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
  20. Mass communication in Asia and the Pacific. Recent trends and developments
    Lent JA
    Media Asia, 1989;16(1):16-24.
    PMID: 12315828
    Matched MeSH terms: Politics*
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