The Singhealth HMDP Reception 2006

16 Jun 2006

By Mr Heng Chee How, Minister Of State For Health

Venue: The Lecture Hall, 4th Floor, National Cancer Centre

Prof Tan Ser Kiat

Group CEO, SingHealth

Prof Ong Yong Yau

Chairman for Singhealth HMDP Committee

Ladies and gentlemen

Being new to the Ministry of Health, I am pleased to be able to meet SingHealth's management and staff in your HMDP awards ceremony. We place great emphasis on developing our talents and I can see that our two clusters have taken pains to invest in, and develop our staff. We want to retain our staff (and here I am not talking about the bond) by giving them opportunities to pursue their interests and developing their careers to their full potential.

The public sector offers great opportunities for advancement and training. It is in the public sector that you get the most challenging clinical cases and the widest range of exposure. The private sector may attract you with more money but not necessarily more professional satisfaction. It was in the public sector that you received your training as a student. It was here that you were taught and now teach others. This is the place to develop our researchers and clinician scientists of tomorrow. The Graduate Medical School will be built here. Universities, polytechnics and technical institutions all have a place in our public sector hospitals. There is a promising future for the aspiring specialised healthcare professional in the public sector.

The Health Manpower Development Plan (HMDP) was introduced by the Ministry of Health in 1980 to develop our health manpower capabilities and specialist training by exposure in the best institutions abroad and by inviting Visiting Experts from top institutions overseas to teach our healthcare professionals. Succeeding cohorts of healthcare professionals, doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, allied health professionals and administrators have benefited from HMDP and shared what they learnt with colleagues here. Many of the advances that we see in our hospitals have resulted from this longstanding successful programme.

When the HMDP was devolved to the clusters in 2001, MOH provided a budget of around $4 million each year for the HMDP Fellowship Scheme. The clusters have responded by adding their own funds to supplement this. I was informed that SingHealth has thus doubled the number of awards by a matching grant from SingHealth Foundation. For FY2006, I am told that SingHealth has selected 105 health personnel for HMDP overseas training.

Today healthcare has become more and more complex but the patient is a whole person. You have been taught not to treat patients merely as a disease or diseases but as persons with disease. In the midst of many medical procedures and treatment, we have to treat patients as fellow citizens, and fellow human beings in need. Compassion and good communication should be our constant motto. I am glad to know that there are initiatives to integrate, to manage the patient as a whole and not in fragmented parts. You have taken positive steps to promote family medicine besides promoting it in your polyclinics. I hope many family physicians in the community will also benefit from such initiatives.

Another group of health professionals whom we want to develop is the Advanced Practice Nurses or APNs. We believe that the Advanced Practice Nurse will add to the range of care in the hospitals and provide the important continuity of care when junior doctors rotate every few months to other postings. We must continually support the upgrading of skills. Nurses form one of the most important visible groups of staff in healthcare and by upgrading their skills we will achieve highly measurable improvement in care. Studies have demonstrated that Advanced Practice Nurses' intervention and care contributed to reduced length of stay, fewer hospital admissions, and lower re-admission rates and healthcare costs. Our HMDP, Masters and other training programmes will help build the core team of much needed Advanced Practice Nurses.

I congratulate all recipients of this year's awards under the HMDP Fellowship Programme. I also encourage everyone to continue to do your best and to constantly improve your skills. There are many opportunities ahead, with healthcare and biomedical sector being one of the fastest developing areas in our economy. I wish you every success and my best wishes for the training ahead.

Thank you.