Opening Address by Dr Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Health, at the Quality and Productivity Festival 2018, 19 September 2018

Dr Gerard Ee, Chairman, Agency for Integrated Care

AIC Board Members

Distinguished Guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

Introduction

1.     Good morning. It gives me great pleasure to be at the 6th Quality and Productivity Festival organised by the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC).

2.     I would like to extend my heartiest congratulations to all 407 recipients of this year’s Community Care Excellence Awards. They have demonstrated exemplary passion and commitment in delivering quality care and service to their clients.

Focusing on the Three Beyonds

3.     With rising healthcare demands from an ageing population, Singapore is making three transformational shifts to keep our healthcare system sustainable - Beyond Hospital to Community, Beyond Healthcare to Health, and Beyond Quality to Value. By shifting the gravity of care beyond hospital to the community, our seniors can enjoy convenient care closer to home and age in place. By promoting a healthy lifestyle, we want Singaporeans to enjoy better health. By driving value-based healthcare, we strive to maintain both affordability and quality of care for our seniors.

4.     The theme of this year’s quality and productivity festival is “Delivering Value for Clients… One Improvement at a time”. With rising demands for community care services, we must find better ways to support our seniors to age and live well in the community, while keeping costs sustainable. I am indeed glad that over 600 of you are here with us today on this shared mission.

Beyond Hospital to Community

5.     The biennial Community Care Excellence Awards recognises outstanding individuals for demonstrating excellent service standards, and high performing teams for their efforts in improving clinical quality, enhancing client experience and innovating for productivity. These are important pillars supporting the shift of care for our seniors to their communities and the homes.

6.     First introduced by AIC in 2014, the Awards are dedicated solely to the Community Care sector. I am heartened to learn that AIC has been receiving more submissions over the years. This year alone, over 600 submissions have been received, which is more than double that of 2016.

7.     Ang Mo Kio-Thye Hua Kwan Hospital is one of the 10 Team Award winners this year. Their therapists redesigned rehabilitation programmes to bring in trained therapy dogs to enhance their patients’ rehabilitation experience. For instance, sessions were customised for patients to take therapy dogs for walks in the garden to build up muscular strength in their legs. The patients also broke animal treats into smaller pieces to feed the dogs, to keep their fingers nimble. With these animal-assisted therapy exercises, patients who require rehabilitation, such as those recovering from stroke or bone fractures, are increasingly looking forward to their therapy sessions at Ang Mo Kio-Thye Hua Kwan Hospital.

8.     The strong commitment to quality improvement and service is similarly observed among individual healthcare staff. 42-year-old staff nurse Ms Lily Li from HCA Hospice Care is one of the 10 individual Gold Award winners this year. Since she was young, Lily always had a passion to care for people around her, leading her to a nursing career. In 2011, she moved from a public hospital to Community Care to forge closer relationships with her patients and their families by caring for them over a longer period of time. Lily especially values time spent connecting with her patients and their family members on a personal level. With Lily’s constant encouragement, her patients’ family members view her as a supportive friend rather than just a nurse. The human touch, which Lily exemplifies in her work, is key in our sector.

9.     Quality and service improvement is an on-going process. To uplift standards and capabilities in the sector, the Ministry has launched service guidelines covering areas such as care delivery, staff training and staff competencies across the various care settings.We have also invested in capability development initiatives in tandem to improve quality of care, such as through sector forums to share good practices, and funding support for staff development. We will continue to work with providers in this journey to provide better care to Singaporeans.

Beyond Healthcare to Health

10.     We have stepped up efforts to promote a healthy lifestyle for all Singaporeans. HealthHub was developed as a one-stop portal and mobile application to give Singaporeans access to a wide range of health content, exercise rewards, e-services as well as secured access to the user’s personalised health records. We are seeing an increase in the number of people accessing HealthHub from some 50,000 to 80,000 for the past 7 months. HealthHub Track, a module in HealthHub, is Singapore’s first free personal health management dashboard that can be used to track the user’s lifestyle changes and progress in meeting health goals such as ‘Get Fit’, ‘Sleep Better’ and ‘Lose Weight’. In particular, the ‘Prevent Diabetes’ Track is designed to encourage HealthHub Track users who are at risk of developing diabetes to make lifestyle changes and adopt healthier habits to prevent the condition. Over 2000 users have registered on the “Prevent Diabetes” Track since its launch in April 2017. By providing better access to relevant knowledge and tools such as HealthHub, we aim to empower Singaporeans to take ownership of and improve their health.

Going Beyond Quality to Value

11.     To keep our healthcare system sustainable, we need to move beyond Quality to Value. We have been stepping up efforts in pursuing productivity initiatives to continue to deliver good and affordable care for our clients, with better or equally good clinical outcomes. By helping our limited manpower with automation, reinventing care models and streamlining work processes, our healthcare staff can also focus more on direct care and have a more fulfilling job. To this end, the Healthcare Productivity Fund (HPF), administered by AIC, has been supporting productivity efforts in the community care sector since 2012.

12.     For example, AIC facilitated process improvement workshops, which involved community care providers co-working and co-learning to raise efficiency and quality of existing care processes. Participants were equipped with quality improvement tools and introduced to available technology or equipment to support change. Standard workflows were developed collaboratively, and piloted in the participating institutions before being adopted by other providers in the sector. The participants regularly regroup to share learning points from their implementation efforts. This continuous learning process ensures sustainability in the institutions’ improvement drive and it definitely helps in scaling up good ideas and processes.

13.     Over the past year, more than 20 care providers have completed four process improvement projects which focused on showering, naso-gastric tube feeding, oral feeding and medication management. Participating nursing homes in the showering process improvement project successfully reduced staff time spent on patient showering by up to two hours per day per provider, allowing staff more time to provide direct care or engage residents in rehabilitation and psychosocial activities.

14.     Indeed, I am pleased to note that the extended Healthcare Productivity Fund on the second tranche has been enhanced such that Community Care organisations can get up to 85% funding support for their projects to improve quality and productivity, up from 67%.

Fostering a Strong Culture of Continual Improvement

15.     A culture of continual learning and improvement is important for enhancing quality and raising productivity, to improve care and service delivery for our patients. As we transform our model of care, we must be open to experiment new ways of working, which maximise opportunities for improvement. We also need to work more closely with one another, in sharing best practices, and to co-create better solutions.

16.     Building and sustaining the right mind-set and culture is essential in the longevity our healthcare system. This is not a task that can be accomplished overnight. MOH and AIC will need to work in close partnership with our partners and stakeholders in the community care sector. This conference is one way we can share and pick up new knowledge on ways to improve care and deliver value for clients, step by step, making one improvement at a time.

Conclusion

17.     Improving quality and productivity to achieve better health, better care and better life for Singaporeans is an ongoing process and journey. I thank each and every one of you here today for your commitment and passion to improve our healthcare system.

18.     Congratulations once again to all our 407 award winners. I wish all of you a most pleasant day ahead and the most fruitful festival. Thank you very much.