LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR RETIREMENT VILLAGE IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

The development of retirement villages requires proper and detail planning. The elderly requires a special living arrangement, where the facilities and other attributes must be in accordance with their abilities (Tan & Lee, 2018).  This issue could be addressed with a proper legal administration framework and policy, in which the current existing provisions available in this country are inadequate to provide such regulatory. Governed by two distinct Acts, the Care Centres Act 1993 under the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development and the Private Healthcare Facilities and Services Act 1998 under the Ministry of Health, both are redundant and overlapping in nature.  Even with these two duplicate Acts, the provisions are indeed too general, focusing on governing all care centres rather than retirement villages alone. The Private Aged Healthcare and Services Act 2018, which was intended to relieve these two Acts, however, was never brought into implementation. The gap in the current framework, must be redressed with development of a more suitable regulatory and policy framework as well as guidelines on retirement village. Aside from that, the fact that Malaysia is a Muslim majority country must not be overlooked, where the integration of Muslim-friendly component into the law would benefit the Muslims, not only to attract potential Malaysian customers, but Muslims from all over the world to choose Malaysia as their retirement destination. This research is intended to look into, and to analyse the current local and international legal framework relevant to the retirement village. It is also the objective of this research to propose for certain administrative mechanisms that will support and enhance the establishment of Islamic retirement village.