KUCHING: Huge efforts are needed to train hospital staff to assist customers during cashless payment, says Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) Central Women section chairman Kho Teck Wan.
According to Kho, while she supported the Health Ministry’s decision to implement cashless payment at government healthcare facilities, she believed that more efforts needed to be in place prior to the rollout.
“In rural Sarawak, such effort will require the healthcare facility to be equipped with stable Internet connection and sufficient staff,” she said on Monday (July 25).
Kho was commenting on the Health Ministry’s move to go cashless, starting Oct 1, and all payments can be made using debit cards, credit cards and e-wallets.
She further pointed out that extra manpower and technical staff were needed as most of the patients were the elderly, adding that “senior citizens are the group who are less likely to use digital payment on a daily basis.”
Kho noted that the Health Ministry is engaging with DuitNow and terminal-point-of-sale (TPOS) for digital payment and therefore, urged the ministry to collaborate with SPay Global as it is one of the widely used mobile payment applications in Sarawak.
In a circular dated June 21, the ministry’s secretary-general, Datuk Harjeet Singh, said the move was in line with the Health Ministry’s Anti-Corruption Plan 2021-2022, which had outlined the initiative for cashless payment at its health facilities to prevent leakages in government revenue.
The move was also in line with the 2021 Malaysian Digital Economy Blueprint, which had stipulated that all agencies at the federal and state levels must use cashless payment as an effective transaction method by this year.
