Webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxguD0gYM-w

TRANSCRIPT

Jack Shen Lim, General Secretary, Malaysian Pharmacists Society

“Hi, my name is Jack Shen Lim. I am the General Secretary of the Malaysian Pharmacists Society. I’m a practising pharmacist in Malaysia. The Preventive Care Framework was formulated by the Malaysian Pharmacists Society last year in 2024, basically to empower pharmacists and also individuals, patients or consumers, to take control of their health.

“What the Preventive Care Framework strives to do is to bring together existing services in community pharmacy, making them standardised across different pharmacies, so that when the consumer or the patient goes to one pharmacy to another community pharmacy, they will get the same level of service and care.

“So basically, the Preventive Care Framework is services that will be delivered through community pharmacies, be [them] in rural or urban areas. In order to standardise the way this is being delivered to the consumers or patients, training will be involved as well as the development of new guidelines and standard operating procedures [SOPs] for community pharmacies.

“The Preventive Care Framework addresses five main areas. They are also what we call the five pillars. A lot of services, as well as pharmacies, focus on training and accreditation of pharmacists, so that’s actually one of the pillars of this. And a lot of it also covers the patient engagement. We’ll look at pharmacist engagement, talking about renumeration for the services being offered. The second thing we also need to look at is actually the SOPs. And the last pillar that we need to mention is the healthcare ecosystem as well. Because pharmacy is not an island.

“Basically, how these services will be remunerated or delivered will be a combination of out-of-pocket spending by the patient, it might be a government service, or it could be linked to insurance. For example, with regards to antimicrobial resistance and minor ailments, [they] most likely will not be a fee-based service. However, for things like pre-diabetes screening or counselling, we are looking at a fee-based model.

“The key enablers is actually a very strong alignment to the Malaysian Ministry of Health. We also have very good partnerships with tech companies, with pharma companies, and also academic institutions to bring a standardisation of these services. The biggest barrier is actually about reimbursement and the fees, because there’s no standardisation of a fee payment model. There’s no process. There’s no national health insurance.

“So why are we doing this framework? We can actually highlight that pharmacists are the best-placed healthcare professionals for preventive care in any health system, any part of the world.”