MALAYSIA’S most famous Health Director-General Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah retires on April 21 on his 60th birthday.
He is better known than most of his predecessors, because through the most trying time this nation has had – the Covid-19 pandemic – he was the calm, reassuring and confident face and voice the rakyat saw daily at the Health Ministry’s daily press conferences.
It was the same for me the first time I met him.
I was undergoing dialysis in 2010; it had been eight years at that point, and I needed to remove my parathyroid, which was acting up and not regulating calcium, phosphorus and magnesium.
It was one of the many side effects of having kidney failure. So off to Putrajaya Hospital I went to meet a specialist about removing it.
When I met Datuk Seri Dr Noor Hisham, as he was then, I was immediately impressed by his demeanour and friendliness.
Add to that, he surprised me by whipping out an iPad – this was 2010, and in my mind, doctors hadn’t made the digital leap yet – and explaining to me the step-by-step process of the surgery and recovery, with pictures to boot.
He looked at my blood results and asked me if I was considering a transplant at some point, and if so, he would leave one of the four parathyroids in, to help regulate the above chemicals post-transplant.
This was something I hadn’t considered at that point, and I was very pleased that he thought of it.
At the end of the consultation, he scheduled a date for my surgery and then blew my mind when he offered me his personal phone number.
He said I may think of questions later after I had left the hospital and if so, just text him. No doctor had done that for me before.
Post-surgery, he visited me in the ward, looked at the wound on my neck, met my wife and told her how to help care for the wound. Then he discharged me and told me that I didn’t need to come back for a follow-up – just take a clear picture of the wound healing and send him pictures daily.
If, at any point, he felt it wasn’t looking good, he would ask me to come in for a follow-up.
Mind you, this was 2010, and at this point, he was the health deputy DG. I only found out about this post-surgery from the nurses in the ward. He never mentioned it in any of our conversations. He put me and my healthcare needs first.
Fast forward to 2013, after I had my kidney transplant and was selected for a WHO patient advocacy training. Once the three-day training was over, the health DG at the time was invited to present us our certificates.
We were both pleasantly surprised when he walked in, saw me and exclaimed, “This is my patient”. I was so glad to find out that he had just recently become the health DG.
We reconnected then when I was voted in as chairman of the Patient for Patient Safety Malaysia.
I have the honour of serving on several boards of healthcare organisations as well as the National Patient Safety board which the DG chairs.
I remember the time when I lived in the UK, and we continued our conversations, with me sharing what I learnt during conferences abroad and how we can improve the local healthcare landscape.
Anywhere he went – and if he found out I was at the same conference – he would make time to sit down, talk about my health and share what is the latest in Malaysia.
Over the years, he has been one of the go-to people for me to know more about healthcare. We frequently text, and even during the worst of Covid-19, he would reply to my questions and give advice on how we here at The Vibes should look at data.
Most Malaysians know that his press conferences were quite clear and informative, and he was very aware that our daily needs and fears dictated our adherence to the rules imposed by the government at the time.
He always did his best to convey the seriousness of Covid-19 while in discussions with me; he knew that people were suffering from a lack of income and needed to go back to work.
Doctors, by and large, see communication as a “soft skill”, while I, as a patient advocate, see it as an essential one.
I am just one of the many patients he has had in his sterling career, and we see him as an exemplary measure of a doctor who listens to, cares for, and treats patients as individuals instead of reducing them to an illness. This empathy he had was clearly felt when we watched those daily press conferences.
As patients, we would love for all our healthcare professionals to emulate these qualities while they treat us.
As we expect our healthcare professionals to care for us as humans, it is important to acknowledge those who lead with such values as their core culture, and our retiring DG is among those who embody that.
While I am glad he will now finally have some time to spend with his children after 35 years in public service, I am sure that he will be back in some way to healthcare, because there is so much more still to be done, and I am sure he will feel bored soon.
Thank you, sir, for being a shining light in Malaysia’s darkest hours. – The Vibes, April 19, 2023
Manvir Victor is an executive editor at The Vibes
