Plans to establish the National Integrated Care Centres (NICE) in Sarawak and Penang are still being studied, with the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry working through what each site will need before it can open next year.
Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri said the two centres, announced in Budget 2027, support the government’s wider plan to build up care services across the country. “We are very happy with the Budget because it supports what we have envisioned for the whole country,” she told New Straits Times.
The ministry will now hold talks with both state governments to settle the way forward. That covers the infrastructure each centre requires and the arrangements needed to set them up before work starts, she explained in Butterworth.
The service may be run by private operators and non-governmental organisations, Utusan Malaysia noted. That is why the ministry wants to review the plan and work out how the centres will operate with both states before anything is fixed, she added.
The two states should prove the model first. “Let it be carried out in those two states first, and if it is successful, we support the proposal to have this centre nationwide as well,” she said.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim announced the centres when he tabled Budget 2027 on 9 October. The same budget cut service tax on elderly care from eight per cent to six per cent from 1 January 2027 and exempted annual care fees of up to RM96,000, while more than RM40 million was set aside through HRD Corp to train 8,000 people for the care sector, DayakDaily reported. Senior citizen assistance rises to RM1.3 billion next year, reaching nearly 200,000 people, and a Senior Citizens Bill is being drafted to address abandonment.
The NICE centres are meant to sit at the middle of that push. Each will combine training, research and care for older people, so that caregivers, operators and families work to the same standards instead of setting their own.
Malaysia is preparing for aged-nation status, and a bigger, better trained care workforce is needed to meet it. The training allocation for 8,000 carers is aimed at closing part of that gap.
Sarawak and Penang will each host one centre. Neither the locations nor a construction schedule have been announced, and the ministry has yet to say how the centres will be staffed or who will pay for daily operations.
