The global economic downturn caused decline in purchasing power. Patients may try to seek for cheaper options such as public hospitals.
Sunway Medical Centre’s competitors such as KPJ Healthcare and Columbia Asia are expanding their hospitals to different strategic locations across Malaysia. This may further threaten the patient’s source for Sunway Medical Centre as they only have one hospital located at Petaling Jaya.
Malaysia’s doctor to population ratio is still falling short of the 1:600 standard set by the World Health Organization (Borneo Post 2011). There is lack of qualified medical specialists to cater the growing demand for healthcare services.
From political perspective, under the Private Hospital Act 1971, government monitors and regulates private hospitals operation. One of the regulations imposed by government is that all recruitment of nurses must at least 60% from local, and this may lead to difficulty for private hospital in human resources recruitment. Excessive regulation by government may become threats for continual growth in the healthcare industry which will become another threat for Sunway Medical Centre (Soon Seng 2009).
Already high regulations and controls in the medical centre only set to increase as the government places representatives on private hospital boards.(Palavinel, 2011)
Low profit margins may crash even lower as the government contemplates regulating prices that private hospitals can charge. (Ding J, 2010)
Recession and economic downturn.**
Economic recession will affect the business; also customers will be affected, and so will be less demand on the hospital, just if the customer is compelled to go to the hospital so the economic recession will negatively affects the hospital.