Kuala Lumpur, July 13: Malaysia has no dedicated university or TVET pathway for training dementia care workers, a gap that experts say is becoming more urgent as the country’s dementia caseload climbs and its first disease-modifying Alzheimer’s treatment reaches the market.
The admission came from the Dementia Alliance Malaysia (DAMai), a nationwide coalition of healthcare professionals, NGOs and care providers working to implement the government’s National Dementia Action Plan (NDAP) 2023–2030.
Asked whether local universities offered enough courses for this kind of specialised care, the answer was blunt.
“No, there’s literally nothing. It’s something we really need to set up,” Professor Tan Maw Pin, President of DAMai, told dailystraits.com.
She said the Alzheimer’s Disease Foundation Malaysia (ADFM) has developed a “training the trainers” programme, which it hopes will eventually be accredited by Alzheimer’s Disease International but that initiative is aimed mainly at home-based caregiver training, not a broader dementia care career pathway.
Genting Dementia Day Care Centre is now hoping to work with TVET providers to build out proper modules that could help shape a national dementia care training model, she said.
The shortage of formal training feeds into a wider staffing reality: most of Malaysia’s aged care workforce is already made up of foreign workers, drawn from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and increasingly Nepal.
Tan said the sector’s reliance on migrant labour partly reflects local attitudes toward the profession.
“Caring is not considered something that is glamorous, and we need to change that,” she said. Genting Dementia Day Care Centre has responded by hiring Malaysian university graduates and postgraduate degree-holders to design “positive spin” care strategies specifically for people living with dementia work she distinguished from conventional aged care, since dementia patients need support that preserves remaining function rather than simply assisting with mobility, dressing or washing.
Dementia-friendly infrastructure remains similarly limited.
Only two shopping malls in the country currently carry the designation — Atria, where the Alzheimer’s Disease Foundation Malaysia was previously based, and 1 Utama, where the initiative has since expanded.
But Tan argued the goal should extend well beyond retail spaces.
People with mild or even moderate dementia can often remain productively employed, she noted, since work-related skills tend to be among the last lost as the disease progresses — making the case for dementia-friendly workplaces and communities more broadly, not just designated public venues.
On the patient side, Tan said clinicians are increasingly seeing younger cases.
While dementia can, in rare instances, affect children, young-onset dementia more typically first appears in patients in their 40s. DAMai has not yet produced a firm projection of how much care capacity Malaysia will need over the next five years, she said, but flagged it as a calculation the sector still has to do.
A New Drug, and a System Racing to Catch Up
The training gap surfaces just as Eisai Malaysia has introduced LEQEMBI (lecanemab), the country’s first disease-modifying therapy for early Alzheimer’s disease. Unlike existing treatments that only manage symptoms, LEQEMBI targets amyloid-beta, a hallmark protein buildup in the brain, and has been shown to slow disease progression. It received full approval from the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency in January 2026.
Kam Ai Teng, Managing Director of Eisai Malaysia, said the shift toward addressing the underlying disease process makes earlier diagnosis more critical than ever, since significant brain changes often occur well before symptoms become visible.
The stakes are considerable. The number of Malaysians living with dementia is projected to rise to as many as 825,000 by 2050 — more than triple current levels — as the population ages, according to ADFM figures. The condition already costs the country an estimated RM7.9 billion to RM8.5 billion a year, or close to 0.5% of GDP, once healthcare spending, lost productivity and unpaid family caregiving are factored in.
Tan said scientific progress on treatment needs to be matched by system readiness, warning that a drug’s real-world impact depends on how prepared the country’s early detection, diagnosis and care infrastructure actually are — which is precisely where DAMai’s coalition of healthcare professionals, NGOs and policymakers is trying to close the gap.
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