Our National Specialty Centres

Synonym(s):

SingHealth, Singapore’s largest healthcare cluster, has five national specialty centres – National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS), National Dental Centre Singapore (NDCS), National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS, National Neuroscience Institute (NNI) and Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC).

Did you know that the roots of our national centres can be traced back to Singapore General Hospital (SGH), the flagship hospital of the cluster celebrating its Bicentennial in 2021? Let’s take a closer look at the inception of each of these five centres.

The inception of medical specialisations

In the early years of Singapore’s independence, establishing an effective healthcare system was one of the newly formed government’s top priorities. Back in the 1960s, while the standard of living had improved markedly, there was a need to design and structure our healthcare system to meet Singapore’s demands then and into the future.

Government initiatives shaped the development of public healthcare and paved the way for medical specialisation. In 1970, The Ministry of Health (MOH) commissioned the Committee on Medical Specialisation that laid the foundation for medical specialties and sub-specialties. This catapulted Singapore’s health system to a level that is on par with many first-world countries.

SGH housed a number of medical specialties, such as neurosurgery and cardiothoracic surgery, from which our five national centres came from.

In 1993, MOH introduced a "White Paper on Affordable Healthcare" - a blueprint for enhanced specialist healthcare that called for the consolidation of resources to develop national centres for disciplines with large patient loads. Shortly after, our national specialty centres were progressively incorporated and opened. With the inception of SingHealth in 2000, the five specialty centres became a part of the largest public healthcare cluster caring for the nation.