National Health & Morbidity Survey
The National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS) has been an important platform for monitoring the health of the population in Malaysia.The objectives of the NHMS are to provide the community-based data on the pattern of common health problems, health service utilisation and health expenditure in the community. Findings of the NHMS support the Ministry of Health to review the priorities and activities of the health programme, to plan for future allocation of resources and to evaluate the impact of strategies.
The NHMS (NHMS I) was first initiatedin 1986 and the interval was conducted once every 10 years. In 1996, the NHMS II was then conducted, followed by the NHMS III in 2006. However, since 2011,the interval was shortened from 10 to 4 years to ensure that more recent data and information can be used for the planning of health programmes. The NHMS IV (2011-2014) consists of NHMS 2011, Global School-Based Student Health Survey 2012 (GSHS) and Malaysian Adult Nutrition Survey 2014 (MANS).
The current cycle is NHMS V (2015-2018).The NHMS 2015 covers most of the modules in NHMS 2011 especially on health care demands, non-communicable diseases (NCD),risk factors of the non-communicable diseases, anda few additional modules such as tuberculosis, dengue and traditional and complementary medicine. A total of 10,000 randomly selected living quarters (LQ) were involved in the data collection which has been completed successfully in June 2015. Institute for Public Health and other collaborating institutions are in preparing the report to be released soon.
Maternal and Child Health 2016
Institute for Public Health continue moving on to the new scope on maternal and child health, where NHMS: MCH 2016 took action. This survey will focus on children under 5 years and their mother aged 15-49 as well as other women in reproductive age (20-49). The objectives are to assess children under 5 on immunisation coverage, infant feeding status, child development, autism and the common morbidities. While for women, this survey will focus on antenatal coverage, birth history, postnatal care and pre-pregnancy care. There will be 16,000 randomly selected households nationwide with estimated 48, 000 respondents. This survey will have face-to-face interviews by trained research assistants and nurses from the Ministry of Health, self-administered questionnaires by mothers and child's developmental assessment and measurement of height and weight for children under 5 years. Data collection process will be conducted from mid-February until end of May 2016.