Speech by Dr Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Health, at the 2nd National Collaborative Prescribing Programme Graduation Ceremony, 14 December

Associate Professor Lita Chew, Chief Pharmacist 

Ms Joann Pang, Deputy Chief Nursing Officer 

Associate Professor Alexandre Chan, Deputy Head of the NUS Department of Pharmacy 

Associate Professor Kamala Devi, Director of Education (CET), NUS Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies 

Distinguished Guests 

Ladies and Gentlemen 

1.     A very good morning to everyone. I am pleased to join you today at the second National Collaborative Prescribing Programme Graduation Ceremony. 

2.     Today marks a significant milestone in our nation’s healthcare transformation, as the second batch of collaborative prescribers graduate from the National Collaborative Prescribing Programme hosted by the National University of Singapore. 

3.     I hear that this course has been rigorous and intense, with countless weekly readings, clinical work, assessments, and an OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). Despite these challenges and your busy schedules, you have shown us your resilience and unwavering dedication. I am sure your friends and colleagues here today are proud of you for completing the course. I am happy to welcome you into a small but growing group of Collaborative Prescribing practitioners. 

4.     I would like to thank the staff and faculty of the Department of Pharmacy and the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, as well as the Collaborative Prescribing Standing Committee’s Curriculum Committee’s facilitators and support staff. All of you have played a role in the success of the graduates today.

A Nation for All Ages

5.    Our healthcare system is changing rapidly. We are facing an ageing society, and the number of seniors aged 65 and above is expected to almost double from 500,000 to 900,000 by 2030. This shift in population demographics means that Singapore must plan and prepare for a rapidly ageing population in the next one to two decades. 

6.     With growing demands of care from the increasing number of seniors and a slowing labour force growth, we cannot continue the status quo. There is a need to reshape our healthcare system to be leaner, more efficient and sustainable. We are in fact actively working on transforming our healthcare landscape to shift care from hospital to the community, to transit beyond quality to value and to move beyond healthcare to health. 

7.    To support this transformation, we must also equip our healthcare workforce to be future-ready, in order to provide better care, and to achieve higher healthcare productivity. The collaborative prescribing programme is one example where our senior pharmacists and Advanced Practice Nurses (APN) can upgrade their skills to deliver quality healthcare more effectively. 

Benefits of Collaborative Prescribing 

8.    Collaborative prescribing potentially facilitates care transformation, by enabling service innovation and better continuity of care from hospital to community through team-based care. Allow me to illustrate this with an example. An elderly patient has just been discharged from the hospital, but requires follow-up treatment at home. His nearby polyclinic activates an APN, who is a collaborative prescriber, to provide home care for him. The APN can now assess the healthcare needs of the patient from his home, and prescribe medications accordingly, saving the patient an additional trip to the polyclinic just to obtain a prescription.

9.    Collaborative prescribing also enhances accessibility to healthcare. As pharmacists and APNs, many of you already lead clinics, increasing the number of patient touchpoints in our healthcare system. For example, some of you run anticoagulation clinics where you help to titrate patients’ warfarin doses, while some lead heart failure clinics, where you titrate medications like beta blockers and ACE inhibitors. Collaborative prescribing pushes the roles of these clinics even further by removing the need for a doctor’s countersignature on your prescriptions. Not only does this save waiting time for your patients, it also frees up doctors to focus on more complex cases, achieving higher healthcare productivity. 

10.  Tackling these new roles would not have been possible without proper skills and knowledge. The National Collaborative Prescribing Programme equips you with the required skills in safe and effective prescribing, and competencies in patient assessments. Having gone through this rigorous course, I have the utmost confidence that you will be able to take on these new roles competently and effectively.

Closing 

11.   Your journey in collaborative prescribing has only just begun. Joining the pioneers before you as part of our early group of collaborative prescribing practitioners, you will play a key role in shaping the culture of how collaborative prescribing will develop in your respective institutions. We need good leaders to continue the drive of professional growth in our healthcare workforce. We need facilitators and supervisors to help guide future nurses and pharmacists who want to be collaborative prescribers. We also need collaborative prescribers such as yourselves to take on more roles in patient care, and develop new innovative services that deliver more efficient and accessible care for our patients. 

12.   In closing, let me take this opportunity to congratulate our second batch of Collaborative Prescribers, and to wish you all the best as you embark on your collaborative prescribing journey. 

Thank you.