Asia Pacific's First Social Prescribing Conference Held in Singapore

​29 October 2022

Media Release

ASIA PACIFIC’S FIRST SOCIAL PRESCRIBING CONFERENCE HELD IN SINGAPORE AS GLOBAL EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON THE BENEFITS OF SOCIAL PRESCRIPTIONS

Singapore, 29 November 2022 – As Singapore tackles the challenges of an ageing population and the rising impact of chronic diseases, care plans involving social prescriptions are key components in enabling our population to live and age well in the community, as we move towards a Healthier Singapore strategy as a nation.

Addressing the social and economic conditions of an individual can have a significant impact on one’s health and wellbeing. Social prescribing is a structured way of improving health outcomes by linking patients to activities, resources and interest groups in the community, optimising their social determinants of health.

To improve the practice of social prescribing and encourage more care providers to include social prescriptions into their care plans, international social prescribing practitioners and local subject matter experts in population health gathered at the inaugural Asia Pacific Social Prescribing Conference in Singapore, titled ‘Social Prescribing and its Impact on Population Health’ on 29 November 2022.

Mr Desmond Lee, Minister for National Development and Minister-in-charge of Social Services Integration was the Guest-of-Honour.

“SingHealth Community Hospitals (SCH) has been part of the Global Social Prescribing Alliance since early 2021. We have been joining international platforms to learn about social prescribing around the world, adopting best practices in our hospitals, and sharing about social prescribing from a community hospital’s perspective. Through this conference, we hope to promote a better understanding of the impact of social prescribing on the wellbeing of patients, and get more practitioners and partners on board with us in this exciting vision of having a robust social prescribing movement in Singapore. This is in line with the Healthier SG strategy that advocates for healthier lifestyles and for the population to take greater ownership of their health,” shared Ms Margaret Lee, Chief Executive Officer of SCH.

Close to 1,000 professionals from local healthcare, social care and education sectors attended the inaugural conference co-organised by SCH together with SingHealth’s Regional Health System (RHS). The event saw more than 20 overseas and local experts from the World Health Organisation, NHS England, Google, University College London and Singapore’s health and social care agencies sharing cutting edge developments in social prescribing, and exchanging ideas on how a whole-person approach to health and wellbeing can impact population health.

Please refer to Annex A for more information on the highlights of the conference.


A new training arm under SingHealth to fill learning gaps in the sector
The SCH Office of Learning (SCHOOL), a new training arm of SingHealth’s RHS was also officially launched during the inaugural conference.

Formed since 2019, SCHOOL co-develops curriculum and sector-relevant training programmes with experts from the healthcare, social care and education sectors to nurture and empower health, social and community care workers with the relevant set of competencies and skills which are future-ready.

“With a focus on workplace learning and principles of adult learning, SCHOOL works closely with partners in the healthcare, social care and education sector to understand the learning needs and aspirations of current and future healthcare providers, and design educational programmes to strengthen the workforce capability in institutions and community through continuous learning. This is critical for us to build a strong ecosystem of care for our community by addressing what matters to them,” shared Professor Lee Chien Earn, Deputy Group CEO (Regional Health System) of SingHealth.

The formation of SCHOOL helps to augment SCH’s efforts in social prescribing. One example is SCHOOL’s collaboration with Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s CET Academy to design and develop the SGUnited Skills (SGUS) Health and Social Care Coordinator (HSCC) course, which equips learners with skills and knowledge in the areas of social prescribing, programme development, and multidisciplinary work. Forty-one learners from career backgrounds such as banking, engineering, healthcare and F&B amongst others, have completed the HSCC course which ended its second run this year.

SCHOOL has also kicked off the first run of its WSQ Course on Implementing Interventions in Health and Social Care, a revision and extension of the HSCC course, earlier in November, and will continue to roll out more courses in collaboration with like-minded partners such as the Institutes of Higher Learning and relevant professional bodies.

Please refer to Annex B for more information on SCHOOL and its partnerships.


Ongoing efforts for a robust social prescribing movement in Singapore
Since end 2019, SCH has progressively introduced social prescribing into its three community hospitals. SCH also marked Singapore’s efforts in social prescribing on the world map, when it clinched the Best International Social Prescribing Scheme Award at the Social Prescribing Network Awards in the UK in 2021 for making social prescribing possible during the pandemic.

The concept of social prescribing and its implementation is also spreading within SingHealth, with the initiative being piloted in SingHealth Polyclinics, and also introduced into Duke-NUS Medical School’s first-year curriculum for the first time this year.

On the national front, SCH and the SingHealth’s RHS have been working closely with community partners on social prescribing initiatives to enhance the health and wellbeing of the population, such as the partnership with the Silver Generation Office to link patients to various community partners. The Ministry of Health has also included social prescriptions as part of the HealthierSG strategy.

SCH will also be partnering the Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth on a systematic way of mapping community assets to support social prescribing, with a view of identifying community assets to improve various aspects of a patient’s general wellbeing. This project involves building a living asset map and developing an asset mapping methodology for social prescribing, and is aimed at identifying ways to enhance the existing patient referral framework with community partners.

Please refer to Annex C for more information on SCH’s social prescribing efforts in Singapore and internationally.


About SingHealth Regional Health System
The SingHealth Regional Health System (RHS) recognises that our population can be empowered to keep well, get well and live well in their communities and homes. To achieve this, we collaborate with like-minded agencies across the health and social care sectors to identify population health needs, promote behaviour changes and develop sustainable programmes to improve quality of life. As an academic RHS, we also leverage population health research to understand healthcare utilisation patterns and to facilitate appropriate interventions across the care continuum. For more information, please visit www.singhealth.com.sg/rhs.


About SingHealth Community Hospitals
SingHealth Community Hospitals (SCH) comprises Bright Vision Hospital, Sengkang Community Hospital and Outram Community Hospital, where the focus goes beyond healthcare to health as patients are provided with a homely environment to recuperate and take part in well-paced personalised care. As part of the SingHealth Regional Health System, SCH believes in working closely with community partners to allow patients to receive holistic and continued care during admission and after discharge.


Annex A – Highlights from the conference
1) Keynote Speeches

• Social Determinants of Health and Social Prescribing
  By Sir Professor Michael Marmot – Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health with the University College of London (UCL), Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, and advisor to the WHO Director-General on social determinants of health in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations
  
  Our health is determined by our social circumstances – where we are born, live, work, play and age are all determinants of health. In his keynote address, Prof Marmot touched on why policies and interventions need to address these social conditions to reduce health inequalities, and how we can optimise these social determinants of health of our population through social prescribing.
  
  
• Social Prescribing and Person-Centred Healthcare
  By Mr James Sanderson – Director of Community Health and Personalised Care, NHS England
  
  In his keynote address, James Sanderson outlined how social prescribing has been implemented in England as part of the wider model of personalised care, created a National Academy for Social Prescribing to further the social movement, and how the healthcare system has embraced social prescribing and included it in all GP contracts. At NHS England, James Sanderson leads a range of programmes that are supporting people in the UK to have greater choice and control over their health and wellbeing.
  
  
• Social Prescribing in the Asia Pacific Region – Empowering communities to support health ageing
  By Dr Hiromasa Okayasu – Director of the Division of Healthy Environments and Populations at the Western Pacific Region Office of the World Health Organisation (WHO WPRO)
  
  Populations are rapidly ageing across Asia and the Western Pacific region. While this phenomenon is often equated with challenges, it also represents a unique opportunity to extend participation and engagement in later life by enabling people to spend more years in better health through social prescribing. In his address, Dr Okayasu shared how social prescribing can empower communities by supporting ageing in place and reviewed key initiatives which have been implemented by WHO.
  
  
• Using Technology to Improve Population Health
  By Dr Von Ngyuen – Clinical Lead for Public and Population Health at Google
  
  Google is building solutions to transform care delivery. Dr Von shared how Google Health intends to help the population manage their health and wellbeing by providing high-quality
  
  information and tools, to bring data and insights to the public health community, and to generate research that catalyse the use of artificial intelligence for the screening and diagnosis of disease.
  
  
• Social Prescribing Advocacy Across Stakeholders
  By Assistant Professor Kate Mulligan – Researcher and Lead at the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing, and Assistant Professor in Social and Behavioural Health Sciences in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
  
  Social prescribing requires collaboration across sectors and spaces. Drawing on lessons from the development of the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing, Dr Kate Mulligan shared insights about taking a strategic, community first, collective impact approach to growing social prescribing across boundaries.

More information about the speakers can be found on https://www.singhealth.com.sg/sch/about-us/conference-speakers.

2) Featuring three breakout tracks for in-depth discussion and sharing
The conference also included an afternoon session with three breakout tracks, where international and local experts shared in-depth on the following topics:

a) Social Prescribing as an Innovative Care Model;

b) Beyond Prescriptions – Health and Social Integration; and

c) Competency Building and Workforce Optimisation


3) Post-conference engagement with family physicians

• 3rd December 2022, Saturday
  
  There will be a social prescribing workshop specially organised in the same week on 3 December for family physicians in Singapore. This workshop will be exploring what social prescribing means to our GPs and how they can practice it in their areas of work.

Annex B – SCHOOL, a new training arm to fill learning gaps in the social and community care sector
SingHealth Community Hospitals Office of Learning (SCHOOL) was formed in 2019 with the aim to co-develop curriculum content, develop and train competencies of employees in healthcare, and the Intermediate and Long-Term Care (ILTC) and social care sectors, to:

• Enable collaborative learning between SingHealth RHS and partners through the co-development and sharing of resources such as competency framework, curriculum, codes of best practice and training tool kits that support continuous learning and practice improvement;
  
  
• Identify new areas of competencies and emerging needs to boost industry training through a faculty comprising experienced, community-oriented healthcare professionals; and
  
  
• Partner Institutes of Higher Learning (i.e. Singapore University of Social Sciences, Republic Polytechnic, Institute of Technical Education) and professional bodies to provide relevant upskilling on-the-job training for industry.
  

SCHOOL strategises its training courses based on market demands and training needs of the ILTC sector.
Aligning to the national SkillsFuture frameworks, SCHOOL has rolled out the SGUnited Skills (SGUS) Health and Social Care Coordinator course to help trainees acquire industry-relevant skills and enhance their employability to take on job roles in the health, social and community care sector. Forty-one learners from different career backgrounds such as in banking, engineering, and F&B amongst others, have completed the HSCC course which had two runs this year.

Among them is 45-year-old Caral Goh Poh Ching, who used to work as an editor for a magazine company. During her time in the corporate world, Caral was an active volunteer with Bright Vision Hospital, and her interest to participate in meaningful work grew into a desire to be part of the healthcare team. As a result, Caral registered for the HSCC course to acquire the relevant skills and knowledge, and is currently employed with SCH as a Patient Activity Coordinator. This December, Caral will be transiting into the role of a Wellbeing Coordinator, where she will be working closely with the Hospital’s multidisciplinary care team to engage patients and identify issues that surround social determinants of health which can impact patients’ health and wellbeing.

Coming up, SCHOOL will continue to rollout the WSQ Implementing Interventions in Health and Social Care course and other WSQ courses, as well as other non-WSQ courses that seek to fill learning gaps in the sector.


Partnership with the Institute for Adult Learning
Since 2021, SCHOOL has also inked an MOU with the Institute for Adult Learning (IAL) to strengthen its teaching faculty in training the next generation of healthcare professionals through a curriculum focusing on innovation, building capacity, capability and competency. SCHOOL will be working with IAL to explore micro-credentials or digital badges for recognition of critical core skills, co-conferred by IAL and SingHealth, as well as on an upcoming workshop for learners in the first half of 2023.


Annex C – Marking Singapore’s social prescribing efforts in Singapore and internationally
Social Prescribing in SCH
Since end 2018, SingHealth Community Hospitals (SCH) has progressively introduced the Social Prescribing programme into its three community hospitals – Bright Vision Hospital (before its transformation into a dedicated COVID-19 care facility), Sengkang Community Hospital and Outram Community Hospital, by deploying Wellbeing Coordinators (WBCs) into the hospital wards to engage patients, get to know them individually, identify their social determinants of health and connect them with relevant activities and social agencies in the community.

SCH won the Best International Social Prescribing Scheme Award at the Social Prescribing Network Awards in 2021 in the UK

During the pandemic, SCH’s social prescribing programme evolved into e-social prescribing – a programme thoughtfully curated together with the Institute for Adult Learning under the National Centre of Excellence (NACE) initiative.

This programme aimed to help elderly patients better understand technology during the pandemic so that they can remain connected with loved ones despite the social restrictions in place. Suitable patients in SCH were enrolled into this e-social prescribing programme, where the elderly patients learned how to use smartphones, QR codes, connect to Wi-Fi and install WhatsApp in order to stay connected with their families and friends.

As a result of this initiative which made social prescribing possible during the pandemic, SCH clinched the Best International Social Prescribing Scheme Award at the Social Prescribing Network Awards in 2021, marking Singapore’s efforts in social prescribing on the world map.


Social Prescribing spreading within SingHealth and beyond

• Within SingHealth
  Besides introducing social prescribing in our community hospitals, SingHealth Polyclinics have also joined the efforts and has been leading the way for social prescribing on the outpatient front.
  
  This year, Duke-NUS Medical School introduced social prescribing for the first time in their first-year curriculum of its Doctor of Medicine Programme (MD). Students on this programme are attached to Wellbeing Coordinators at Outram Community Hospital as part of their community care module. This provides early opportunity for students to interact with healthcare workers, patients and their families, and recognise the importance of the social determinants of health and the wider implications of social prescribing. This will help develop students to be more holistic, humanistic and population-based in their practice of medicine.

• Beyond SingHealth and into the local community
  SCH, together with SingHealth RHS, have been working with community partners on social prescribing initiatives, such as the collaboration with the Silver Generation Office to link patients to various community partners.
  
  SCH and SingHealth RHS are also reaching out to GPs on social prescribing, starting with the upcoming Social Prescribing Workshop for family physicians on 3 December 2022.
  
  SCH will also be partnering the Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth on a systematic way of mapping community assets to support social prescribing. This project involves building a living asset map and developing an asset mapping methodology for Social Prescribing, and is aimed at identifying ways to enhance the existing patient referral framework with community partners.

• On the international front
  Besides winning an international award for e-social prescribing efforts during the pandemic, SCH has been invited by WHO WPRO to help develop an implementation tool kit to support countries which are embarking on social prescribing projects.
  
  SCH also participated in the development of a training programme for practitioners under the WHO’s MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) e-learning program (OpenWHO), where its social prescribing course was launched earlier this year featuring our WBCs and healthcare professionals in 8 training videos.
  
  As part of the Global Social Prescribing Alliance since July 2021, SCH has been invited on various international platforms to share about social prescribing and social determinants of health from a community hospital’s perspective. Lessons learned in SCH’s implementation of social prescribing have also been published in an international peer reviewed journal.
  

  In addition, SCH, partnering with Duke-NUS medical students, has joined a global Social Prescribing Student Interest Group – an international student framework with the National Academy of Social Prescribing, World Health Organisation, World Health Innovation Summit and UNSGII (United Global Sustainable Development Goals Index Institute) Foundation, where students can share and hear from on one another about social prescribing practices around the world.