GCEO Message FY 2009

 
FY 2009 was a good year despite the outbreak of H1N1 influenza which temporarily affected some of our plans. Our institutions wrapped up the year on a positive note with many faring well in the Ministry of Health’s Customer Satisfaction Survey and the Singapore National Eye Centre joining the ranks of Joint Commission International-accredited SingHealth institutions. In early 2010, Singapore General Hospital was the first in Asia to achieve Magnet designation – the highest institutional honour for nursing excellence and leadership awarded by the American Nurses Credentialing Centre.

IMPROVING CARE & DELIVERY
To address growing patient volumes, our institutions upgraded and created new facilities such as SGH’s Same Day Admission Centre, a state-of-the-art Isolation ward and new clinics at National Heart Centre Singapore. Efforts to make national electronic medical records for every patient a reality saw progress with the implementation and rollout of the Nurse Charting, Closed Loop Medication Management, Computerised Physician Order Entry and Sunrise Medication Management modules in our institutions.

STRENGTHENING EDUCATION
A key focus in boosting our education capabilities this year was the establishment of the SingHealth Residency Program. This will run in tandem with the current training programmes which has produced many top clinicians. The Residency Program is a more systematic, structured and enhanced training programme for specialists and family physicians. SingHealth is one of two Sponsoring Institutions in Singapore, chosen for our heritage in medical education and track record in clinical excellence and we are committed to making this Program a success.

REFINING RESEARCH
We boosted the governance and integration of our research efforts in FY09. This was achieved by establishing a centralised cluster-wide Institutional Review Board to strengthen the ethical review of research; the SingHealth Tissue Repository as a centralised resource for donated tissue and serum; and the Centralised Institutional Biosafety Committee. Our research infrastructure was boosted with the opening of the Investigational Medicine Unit for early phase clinical trials, the largest public sector early phase clinical research unit with the only Chronobiology Lab in this part of the world; this will be further enhanced with the building of the new Research Tower at the SGH Pathology Building that will facilitate close collaboration and exchangeof research ideas between SingHealth institutions and Duke-NUS. These developments are fuelled by the significant achievements of our researchers in the local and international arena, with several national award wins and publications in world class, high-impact journals such as Nature, Lancet Oncology and Cancer Research amongst others.

Collectively, these efforts put us in good stead to compete for grant funding to pursue more cutting edge research that will make a difference to patient care.

LOOKING AHEAD
With an ageing population, our challenges will be to continue to manage healthcare costs, attract and retain talent, tackle scarcity of space, build capacity and capability and fortify our institutions against disease outbreaks. At the same time, our journey in pursuit of Academic Medicine must continue to transform care for Singaporeans.

Our first strategic thrust will be the redevelopment of SGH Campus, with the completion of the Multi Storey Car Park, the construction of SGH Pathology Building and the new National Heart Centre Singapore Building as part of Phase I of the Masterplan. Several polyclinics will also be refurbished and improved.

The second strategic thrust will be to continue to ensure timely access to care and manage the bed crunch by making critical and urgent cases our priority. Although non-urgent elective surgeries will continue to be postponed when necessary, we must remain objective and accept this disruption so that patients who are critically ill will get the care they urgently need. To optimise bed capability, we have started operating a 24-bed Rehabilitation Medicine ward at Alexandra Hospital and will continue to explore similar opportunities.

Thirdly, we will continuously put in place sound governance structures to continuously review and improve care processes and reduce inefficiencies. In addition, our vision is for all nine SingHealth institutions to be accredited by Joint Commission International by 2011. Plans to enhance clinical integration with community health partners such as General Practitioners and Intermediate and Long Term Care providers are also underway.

In tandem, we will also continue to make prudent investments in healthcare technology to provide our patients leading edge medical care. These include high-tech medical equipment and systems to ensure seamless care delivery. In people development, we have many talent initiatives and career models that we will be rolling out to recognise talent and remain an employer of choice in the healthcare industry.

To advance our pursuit of Academic Medicine, we continuously foster closer partnerships with Duke-NUS. One step is the formalisation of joint appointments of staff in key positions and the creation of Academic Clinical Departments to cross share expertise. October 2010 also sees the first jointly-organised SingHealth-Duke-NUS Scientific Congress which serves as a platform to share research findings, knowledge and expertise and encourage joint research projects.

We will invest more in clinical and translational research and our main emphasis in education is to build up the new SingHealth Residency Program and ensure a high standard of clinical education and teaching for students of both the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School.

The road ahead gives us the opportunity to scale new heights in medical science, clinical care, research and the training of future generations of even better healthcare professionals. Whatever SingHealth has achieved to date has been accomplished with the primary focus of putting our patients at the heart of all we do. We will continue to keep this central aim our focus as we journey together to Define Tomorrow’s Medicine.


Prof Tan Ser Kiat
SingHealth Group CEO
Annual Report 2009