Datuk Dr Hussein Awang FASc

Appointed on Foundation Fellow, Elected as Fellow in 1995 under the Medical and Health Sciences

Datuk Dr Hussein Awang FASc attended boarding school for his secondary education at Melbourne Grammar School. Following that, Datuk Dr Hussein entered Melbourne Medical School and graduated with MBBS in 1965. Then, he returned to Malaysia, where he got married and commenced resident years at the General Hospital in Singapore and later in Johor Bahru. In Singapore, he was trained in general surgery and was awarded the Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (FRACS). He then moved to the General Hospital Kuala Lumpur (GHKL) for urological training under Dr G. Sreenevasan. He rapidly acquired exceptional clinical and technical skills due to dealing with many cases involving advanced pathology, such as staghorn renal calculi and neglected tumours.

In 1974, he was one of the founding members of the Malaysian Urological Association (MUA) and was later appointed as the president leading the association. This establishment represents a significant milestone in the development of Urology in Malaysia. As cadaveric transplantation was prohibited due to religious restrictions, he switched to performing transplants from a live related donor. In 1975, he marked history as the first surgeon in Malaysia to perform a renal transplant. After this success, he did a total of 75 transplants at GHKL. He held many offices, including representing Malaysia on the Asian Association of Surgeons Council.

In the 1980s, Datuk Dr Hussein has seen the sprouting of private healthcare services. He and his two colleagues were inspired to fill a growing need for private healthcare and relieve the pressure on public hospitals. With the investment by the Johor Corporation (JCorp) and others, Tawakkal Specialist Centre, a 66-bed private specialist hospital run by doctors, was built opposite GHKL. The name “tawakkal” was derived from his grandfather’s house in Johor Bharu and a family clinic in the same state, which means “trust in God” in Arabic. The then Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, graced the official opening of Tawakkal in 1983. It grew through several extensions and was re-built to a hospital that accommodates 200 beds with most senior specialists from GHKL. 

Datuk Dr Hussein remained the dominant influence and ensured that patient respect and care came first and that charity was appropriate in situations of financial difficulty. As a result of this success, the investor JCorp has developed a network of 28 hospitals with 3000 beds in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh. Tawakkal hospital is now known as KPJ Healthcare. 

In his closing years, Datuk Dr Hussein’s vitality started to fade. However, his legacy as the country’s most outstanding urologist remains, and he will be dearly missed.