OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE AS A MEDIATOR ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEAN HEALTHCARE AND SUSTAINABILITY AMONG PRIVATE HOSPITALS IN MALAYSIA USING PLS-SEM

Abstract

Private healthcare has shown tremendous growth over the past decades, even though the public healthcare in Malaysia still dominated. Thus, Eleventh Malaysia Plan has put a revolutionary effort to transform private healthcare sector by pursuing sustainability as well as to improve regulatory framework and increasing global competitiveness. In order to achieve this, it is suggested to perform the best practices in the context of operational excellence to ensure the robustness of Malaysian economy. Therefore, the study was intended to identify if lean healthcare practices positively impacts sustainability but can be influenced by operational performance, among private hospitals in Malaysia. Hence, a quantitative method was applied and the data was collected through survey questionnaires which were randomly distributed to a sample 118 private hospitals in Malaysia with 45 percent response rate. They were analysed by performing PLS-SEM technique with four hypotheses were supported. Results indicates that lean healthcare practices and operational performance positively improved sustainability, showing that these are the important elements should be considered by practitioners. Likewise, the mediating role of operational performance between lean healthcare practices with sustainability were established. Finally, this paper provides some limitations of study and recommendations for future research