26 October 2007
More specialist nursing courses
The Straits Times - pg H16

By Judith Tan

SPECIALIST courses in areas such as palliative care and chronic disease management will be offered to nurses from next year at the Alice Lee Institute of Advanced Nursing.

They will be added to the list of specialist courses now offered by the institute.

Madam Lim Swee Hia, SingHealth's director of nursing, said the new courses will help meet increasing demand for specialised care in a rapidly ageing society.

Nurses will, for example, learn skills relevant to palliative care. 'They can, in turn, teach patients and their caregivers on providing care for terminally ill patients,' she said.

Madam Lim said nurses will also be trained in bereavement management. The institute is looking into incorporating this in its syllabus.

She spoke at SingHealth's annual nursing conference yesterday. The three-day event was attended by more than 500 local and overseas nurses and health-care professionals.

Yesterday also saw a pioneer batch of 79 nursing and para-nursing staff graduate from the health group's three advanced skills and developmental training programmes.

Among them was Madam Parvathy Karupiah, 50. After leaving the manufacturing sector, she stumbled onto the SingHealth booth at a career fair. She has been working at Singapore General Hospital as a patient care assistant - a para-nursing position - since 2003.

The guest of honour at the conference, Minister in the Prime Minister's Office Lim Swee Say, said more than 600 retrenched and unemployed workers have been retrained and started careers in the health-care industry as patient care and health-care assistants.

In order to upgrade nurses' knowledge of advanced health care, SingHealth is working closely with the nursing group at the Mayo Clinic in the United States on the impact of such influences as family history and genomics.