| Summary: | By the year 2020, 9.5 percent of the Malaysian population will be aged 60 years and above. To cope with the increase in elderly, the phenomenon of decreasing family size and other demographic and social factors affecting the family structure has resulted in the need for more public residential care facilities for the elderly to take over the traditional responsibilities of families. Therefore, learning from the best providers is invaluable to establish best practice among the providers in Malaysia. Since the early 1920s, the UK provision of Public Residential Care Homes for the Elderly has evolved continuously establishing UK providers with national frameworks and standards of care practice delivery. With this valuable experience, UK practice, debates, and experiments were followed with great interest by other developing countries such as Malaysia. It would be very beneficial if Malaysia could adapt and adopt the provision structure and best practices from the UK that could be transferred into Malaysia. Facilities Management is gaining increasing recognition in many public organisations in the Western world. Facilities Management can benefit an organisation with its integrated Facilities Management practices at Strategic, Tactical, and Operational levels to deliver best value and best practices to the ultimate users, particularly so in the sector of social care services. The desire to improve both theoretical and practical contributions to the current practices in Malaysia, has ignited the aim of this study to seek opportunities for the transfer of UK best practices for the provision of Public Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly to Malaysia. The purposes of the study were a process of identifying best practices in the UK which could be adopted by Malaysian providers. The lines of inquiries were set to first identify Best Practice Approach in both provisions at each level of practice, seeking to determine Barriers and Enablers for Best Practice Transfer, and finally identifying lessons for the improvement of the provision in Malaysia. A range of research methods consisting of Content Analysis; Visual Photography; Participant Observation; Video Documentary; and Expert Interview were employed to acquire a substantial set of data from selected sources of evidence and research settings in the UK and Malaysia. Lessons learned from the study were considered and a range of important findings emerged. Predominantly, the contributions of this study can be seen as a theoretical contribution, as well as practical contribution, that could finally benefit the Malaysian providers of Public Residential Care Homes for the Elderly.
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