In the surprising major reshuffling of the Singapore cabinet last week, Mr Gan Kim Yong takes over Mr Khaw Boon Wan as Health Minister and has made a blog post to the official MOH blog yesterday.
He pinpoints 3 areas of concern with regards to health care in Singapore - supply of healthcare professionals and workers, healthcare costs and aging-related health issues. Correctly identifying the mistakes is always a good start, so that's half the battle won. Let's hope he perseveres with practical issues to solve them.
The short supply of healthcare professionals has always been a sore point among many locals. In the past, it was incredibly difficult to get into the medical courses in the local universities because requirements were so stringent, doctors-to-be had to literally be perfect to gain entry, and then subsequently be charged exorbitantly high tuition fees. One practically had to be rich, intelligent, have a great attitude, a good heart, ability to keep calm in a crisis, among many other things.
Probably like the doctors from ER. Haha.
Now, we face a shortage of doctors and nurses and hospitals are importing them from foreign countries. Apart from numerous complaints about communication breakdown between patient and health care staff due to language barriers, doctors (both local and foreign) are making headlines for lack of professionalism and poor ethics. What happened to the perfect doctors we were in pursuit of?
Importing doctors and nurses may be a short term solution, but in the long run, there are still many thorns in the flesh, for differences in work culture and ethics, language and and understanding of local issues cannot be overcome by a few technical courses. Furthermore,truly good doctors and nurses are supposed to help troubled patients feel at home and at ease, and there's little chance of that happening if the patient and medical staff can't even communicate effectively with each other.
MOH should work with the local universities, reduce entry requirements, but increase requirements and demands in the course of study (after all, skills and ethics can be improved more quickly during full-time study), so that in the years to come, we will enjoy the care of homegrown medical professionals who truly comprehend the healthcare needs of Singaporeans.
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