Lifetime Achievement Award: Muhammad Radzi bin Abu Hassan

Dr Muhammad Radzi bin Abu Hassan is the 2025 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the leadership, vision and dedication he has displayed through his lifelong commitment to healthcare. Read Muhammad Radzi's story below.

I am very grateful to have held so many varied roles in my career. After graduating from RCSI, I returned home to Malaysia where I began my career as a houseman at Hospital Kuala Lumpur. I really enjoyed the clinical experience and found treating patients was particularly fulfilling and rewarding.

My clinical work led me to postgraduate training and to specialise in the fields of gastroenterology and hepatology. During this period of my career, I encountered many patients with colorectal cancer, often times presented at late stage. Therefore, this prompted me to initiate a colon cancer registry and subsequently embarked on national colorectal cancer screening.

I began to understand the importance of data in improving healthcare from a bigger picture – from data collection to developing an evidence-base to adjusting practice based upon the data. In looking at my own practice, I realised that if we could introduce a large-scale intervention such as a screening initiative, we could identify colon cancer at a much earlier stage, which would make it far more treatable.

Apart from my work in relation to colon cancer, I also developed an interest in treating HIV and hepatitis C. While my work was initially clinically focused, I began to see how research could also inform policies and guidelines that would translate into improved clinical practice at a systemic level. This experience was really what led me into policy-making. I understood that if I wanted to effect change on a bigger scale, then it needed to be achieved through data-driven policy.

My career has really evolved over time from clinician to researcher to policy-maker. At the heart of it I’ve kept one simple philosophy – that everyone should have access to healthcare in a timely and affordable fashion.

Access for all

In the early 2000s there were major breakthroughs in the treatment of hepatitis C but unfortunately the costs of the direct antiviral agents were prohibitively high and largely inaccessible for patients in a middle-income country such as Malaysia meaning that we were treating fewer than 200 patients per year.

I found it unacceptable that a medicine could exist but not be provided to patients due to the cost. With the support of gastroentologists/ hepatologists as well as the Ministry of Health, we were able to collaborate with the Drug for Neglected Diseases (DNDi) and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) on a clinical trial that proved that combining two generic medicines – Sofosbuvir and Ravidasvir – resulted in sustained virological response (cured) in 97% of patients receiving treatment.

Making the medicines affordable was just one element, the second element of the strategy was to ensure that treatment could be accessible by decentralising treatments from hospitals to primary care facilities. Additionally, I also conducted a study to show that a shorter duration of treatment of hepatits C from 12 weeks to eight weeks is just as effective, therefore reducing the cost and improving the compliance.

By ensuring the treatment could be delivered locally as well as shortening the duration, patients such as those in prisons or with a history of drug abuse are more likely to see through the full course of treatment. Understanding your patients, understanding their environments, identifying and removing the barriers to treatment is critical to success.

As a direct outcome of the clinical trial, we were able to develop a new National Strategic Plan and Clinical Practice Guidelines for hepatitis C, to reduce the cost per treatment dramatically and to treat more than 6,000 patients per year.

At the outset, there were some scepticism, but we did engage closely with physicians/stakeholders to share the data with them and to show them that a different approach could work.

Advocating for positive change

Since the early 2000s I’ve had a particular interest in planetary health. I think it is important that people understand that climate change directly impacts our health and also that the healthcare industry is in fact one of the main culprits when it comes to carbon emissions.

I first became involved when I was working in a hospital in Kedah. The hospital was looking to promote the concept of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’. The province of Kedah is known as the ‘rice bowl of Malaysia’ because it is a highly agricultural province that produces much of the rice eaten in Malaysia.

I was approached by a company that was proposing to turn the rice straw left after the harvest into biodegradable products. In collaboration, we were able to use the biodegradable products to produce meal trays, bedpans and also kidney dishes. It was a prime example of the circular economy and was very successful.

In recent years, in my role as Director General of the Ministry of Health, I was involved in incorporating renewable energy as part of our strategy and policies. For me the healthcare setting is the perfect place to promote and showcase sustainability initiatives – you have a high level of footfall in hospitals and primary care clinics.

I worked closely with engineering experts to invest in solar energy, specifically installing solar panels on the roofs of healthcare buildings. For me, working on these initiatives also showed me the potential for public private partnerships, which is a relatively new concept in Malaysia, but one that I believe has real merit.

As Director General of the Ministry of Health, I also pursued several key reforms to enhance service delivery, to maximise preventive medicine through health promotion as well as the use of the primary-care facilities, and to reform healthcare financing. Change is never easy and there has been some resistance but progress has been made particularly in integrating hospitals with primary care centres through a formal clustering arrangement. Additionally, I was also pushing for the digitisation of healthcare records to increase efficiency of service delivery.

My belief is that doctors have several important roles to play – first, they must tend to their patients/people; second, they must commit to teaching and training others; finally, they must generate data that will improve policy and healthcare delivery. I retired recently but I fully intend to continue to contribute towards improving healthcare in Malaysia whether it be through teaching or undertaking further research to support evidence-based policy development.