Singapore provides three healthcare clusters: The National University Health System (NUHS), which runs hospitals and polyclinics in the west; the National Health care Group (NHG) within the central region; plus Singapore Health Services (SingHealth) in the eastern.
“As a regional wellness manager, the objective of a cluster is to look after the health of the geographical segment of population it is taking care of, ” said Mister Ong. “It goes far beyond operating hospitals and polyclinics. ”
“Clusters are already implementing wellness interventions in the community today, but this part will now expand within the coming years, from a relatively small proportion of a cluster’s work to quite a significant proportion in the future. ”
Mr Ong said the Ministry of Health (MOH) would need to work with the particular clusters to take a “strategic, holistic plus system-level perspective” to enhance the health of Singapore’s human population.
He stated this meant determining the “social determinants of health”, or maybe the various factors within people’s lives that can affect their bodily, emotional and mental well-being, including their physical living atmosphere, education, employment and food choices.
“We need a much better grasp of available information as well. Which is second point, to be able to link point associated with care data with community health data. We need to use research to connect the datasets and draw information on which social surgery drive better wellness or overcome poorer health. ”
MOH and the healthcare clusters would after that have to engage neighborhood partners to “go upstream” and information the development of population wellness, said the ressortchef (umgangssprachlich).
He additional that these concepts are not new to the health care clusters, which have already been doing this, but that MOH was formalising and expanding the task.
“This consists of evolving your crucial performance indicators, to feature population into the preventive care much more strongly, ” Mister Ong told an audience of health care professionals at the yearly National Medical Superiority Awards.
He or she noted that occupants may have established interactions with doctors in clusters and private hospitals outside their home region.
“For such cases, MOH will do budget transfers between healthcare groupings at the backend in late every year to are the reason for residents’ different use patterns.
“Residents therefore do not need to become limited to hospitals underneath the cluster that looks after the geographical region they live in, ” he said.
Mr Ong additional that COVID-19 had stressed Singapore’s healthcare system “severely, however the system did not collapse”.
“But this may well be a rehearsal for a much larger problem coming our way, which is an aging population of going down hill health.
“It is not an epidemic curve that continues several weeks, that we may ride through, but an inevitable tendency of health deterioration lasting a couple of decades. ”