Speech by Dr Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State for Health, at the Temasek Foundation International @ 10 Asia Nurse Leaders Forum, 10 April 2017

Mr Goh Geok Khim, Chairman, Temasek Foundation International
Prof Ivy Ng, Group CEO, SingHealth
Assoc Prof Lim Swee Hia, Senior Director, Special Projects, SingHealth; President, Singapore Nurses Association
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

Introduction

1.            Good afternoon. It gives me great pleasure to join you today at the opening ceremony of the Temasek Foundation International @ 10 Asia Nurse Leaders Forum.

2.            Let me extend a warm welcome to our international guests. I understand that joining our local nursing talent here today are nurse leaders and educators from 10 countries, namely China, Sri Lanka, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia. Your presence underscores our commitment to building stronger ties and sharing best practices across borders.

Future healthcare challenges

3.            Like many Asian countries, Singapore faces the multiple challenges of an ageing population. These include a rising chronic disease burden, growing demand for healthcare services and, at the same time, a shrinking labour force. To address these challenges, my Ministry has taken steps to transform the way care is delivered. Our care transformation is underpinned by three shifts – moving beyond hospital-centric care to care in the home and community, moving beyond just good quality care to ensuring it is value-based, and moving beyond delivering healthcare to promoting health among Singaporeans.

4.            To enable care transformation, we need to develop a future-ready healthcare workforce. This is especially so for nurses who form the largest healthcare professional group in Singapore and who are often at the frontline of patient care. In our care transformation journey, nurses are needed to lead care transformation by anchoring primary and community care. Nurses will have to be equipped with deeper skills and knowledge to manage patients with multiple and more complex conditions. They will also need to play a crucial role in moving healthcare upstream and enabling better health for the population. Across the globe, many countries are grappling with a shortage in nursing manpower. We need to redefine the role of nurses vis-à-vis the other healthcare professionals and lay workers in the care team, so that collectively, we can have a more productive healthcare delivery system. In short, we need to build a skilled and competent nursing workforce that is well-trained to meet future healthcare needs.

Developing a competent nursing workforce

5.            Over the next three days, the forum will bring together ideas and facilitate the sharing of best practices and experience among nurses from the region and beyond on how we can further develop our nursing workforce in the key areas of nursing education, quality management, and regulation.

6.            A competent nursing workforce has its foundations in a strong system of nursing education and training. We need to invest in developing the skills and knowledge of our nurses so that they are able to practice and deliver care at their fullest potential. Pathways for training and professional upgrading need to be available for nurses to continually advance their practice. Recognising that training for nurses could be strengthened through cross collaborations, Temasek Foundation International has been supporting exchange programmes between Singapore and various countries in the region.

7.            Over the past decade, many of our local public healthcare institutions have partnered health authorities, hospitals and medical schools in other Asian countries to develop customised training programmes for healthcare professionals there. These programmes have enabled nurses to undergo advanced skills training across various clinical specialties to healthcare management, patient safety, infection control and medication management. To date, more than 3,200 nurse leaders and nursing specialists in Asia have benefitted from the training programmes.

8.            Through a ‘train-the-trainer’ approach, these nurses have also trained other nurses, multiplying the benefits of the exchange. For example, Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital Group partnered Singapore General Hospital in 2013 to train 560 nursing professionals across its network of six hospitals over two years. 125 nurses received further training to be specialist “master trainers” and went on to train more than 1,500 nurses in Shanghai, sharing their skills acquired in various clinical specialties such as intensive care and oncology.

9.            I am heartened to note that our tertiary education institutions have also been strong supporters and partners in these exchange programmes. For example, Nanyang Polytechnic’s School of Health Sciences worked with the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health and Indigenous Medicine to train 120 nursing professionals from 30 hospitals in Sri Lanka over two years in areas including emergency care and gerontology.

10.         Our nursing workforce will also need to constantly innovate to improve both patient care and the working environment for nurses. Nurses often have a key role in shaping changes on the ground. It is notable that many of the nurses who had undergone the training programmes took their learning experience further by developing quality improvement projects. For example, Ruijin Hospital Group has contributed more than 40 projects. These nurse-led initiatives range from enhanced medication trolleys to improve safety in medication administration, to the use of iPads for patient education on pre- and post-operative care. The projects have been successfully implemented at their hospitals, enhancing both patient care and staff productivity.

11.         In Thailand, Tan Tock Seng Hospital had also partnered with King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, Siriraj Hospital, Thai Red Cross College of Nursing and Mahidol University to deliver training courses across a wide range of topics from neurology nursing to evidence-based practice, research as well as risk management. These courses have benefitted more than 4,000 nurses and resulted in 46 quality improvement projects that have improved patient care and work processes.

12.         While we have looked beyond our borders to learn from different care models and practices, I would also like to urge the nursing fraternity to look across care settings. Increasingly, we need to shift the centre of gravity of healthcare provision from hospital to the community. In this regard, the Ministry of Health will be placing emphasis on the development of community nursing in Singapore. I hope that this forum will also allow our local nurses to learn about best practices in community nursing from their counterparts in other countries.

Conclusion

13.         To conclude, I would like to commend Temasek Foundation International, Singapore Nurses Association, and SingHealth, for organising this inaugural forum. We look forward to more of such thought leadership dialogues and networking programmes to advance nursing practice in Asia.

14.         I wish all of you a fruitful exchange at this forum and, to our international guests, an enjoyable stay in Singapore.

15.         Thank you.