Welcome Address at the Eastern General Hospital Campus Groundbreaking Ceremony

Mr Ong Ye Kung, Minister for Health,

Mr Cheng Wai Keung, Chairman, SingHealth,

Members of the SingHealth Board,

Professor Ng Wai Hoe, Group CEO, SingHealth,

Associate Professor Gan Wee Hoe, CEO, SingHealth Community Hospitals,

Healthcare leaders, community partners, esteemed guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen

Introduction

Good morning. Welcome and thank you for joining us today at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Eastern General and Community Hospitals, collectively known as EGH Campus. We are honoured to have Minister for Health, Mr Ong Ye Kung, to grace this occasion, and are heartened to mark this important milestone with you – our partners, friends and members of our community.

Building a new hospital campus is a big challenge. When MOH announced the plans for a new integrated hospital campus in Bedok a few years ago, one of the first things that the newly minted EGH team did was to establish what the new hospitals would stand for and how we hope to impact the people we serve.

We engaged our staff, community partners and the public – particularly those staying in the vicinity – and invited them to share their perspectives and aspirations for the new Campus. We received a clear mandate: to build a hospital campus that centres care around the person, whether patient, care giver or staff.

In line with this, EGH’s vision is to be a great hospital for the community and a great workplace for staff, while the SingHealth Community Hospitals, which oversees the Eastern Community Hospital (ECH), envisions to bridge care and build communities. The new EGH logo encapsulates this vision. You can see a person in the inverse space of the logo icon, surrounded by hearts, signifying the Campus’ goal of providing excellent healthcare and promoting healing that is centred around the person. We have thus themed today’s groundbreaking & community day event “Centering Care Around You”.

The EGH Campus team has been working hard to realise our vision. First, to plan and design the hospitals. Here, I would like to register our thanks to our Eastern Project Committee, led by our Chairman, Mr Cheng, for their invaluable guidance and support, as well as sister institutions within and outside SingHealth for graciously sharing with us lessons and insights from their respective developments. I would also like to thank our clinical and planning teams and consultants – our architects, medical planners, quantity surveyors, engineering and project management teams for the many long hours they have put in to bring us to our milestone here today. They have put thought and care into the hospital design and plans so that our hospital buildings can be run efficiently and in a sustainable manner, to become a place of comfort and healing for our patients and a productive and pleasant workplace for our staff.

We are also grateful for our partnership with National Parks Board (NParks), in planning for the seamless integration of our hospital spaces and the surrounding natural environment. Together, we envisage a peaceful, yet vibrant space which will benefit residents and patients alike.

One SingHealth Approach

Second, to plan our clinical services and care models. While we may be a new hospital campus, the EGH Campus will be no new kid on the block in terms of clinical capabilities and healthcare know-how. Our workforce draws expertise from hospitals and speciality centres in SingHealth, the largest public healthcare cluster in Singapore. SingHealth’s doctors, nurses and allied health professionals – who bring with them a wealth of experience in their various specialty areas – come together under the EGH umbrella to plan the clinical services, design and deliver care in the future EGH Campus.

Through this One SingHealth approach, residents and patients will also have access to national specialty services close to their homes when the EGH Campus is ready. This is made possible through close collaboration and setting up of on-site services by SingHealth institutions such as the national cancer, dental, heart, neuroscience and eye centres in EGH. Residents and patients can be assured that they will receive excellent care from the relevant teams that is calibrated to their needs at different stages of their recovery journey.

Similarly, the EGH Campus will benefit from the presence of SingHealth Community Hospitals. With its experience operating other community hospitals, SCH will partner EGH to explore care models which will seamlessly transition patients from the acute to the community hospital. This integration ensures that the overall recovery time is minimised, enabling patients to return to their homes and workplaces with confidence.

ECH is also offering dedicated palliative and dementia care services to provide care that is wrapped around the unique needs of individuals facing life-limiting illnesses or severe cognitive impairments. With its central philosophy on person-centredness, the ECH care model will ensure that our patients’ quality of life is protected and their dignity, respected.

A Learning Hospital Campus

As we develop the hospitals, the EGH Campus team is continuously learning from best practices from local and international healthcare developments to ensure that we can factor the lessons learnt into our infrastructure designs and future clinical operations. Being a learning hospital campus allows us to stay relevant to evolving health needs and future-proof healthcare.

For example, through the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed how technology can enhance healthcare delivery and make it more accessible to patients and their caregivers. The EGH Campus is establishing itself as a purpose built “phygital” hospital campus, where we will integrate physical and digital solutions to deliver care. We will always emphasise the human touch as the mainstay of our work while we tap on digital solutions and smart technologies to complement care delivery. This will enhance convenience for patients, streamline processes and improve treatment outcomes.

In particular, the EGH Campus team will be part of SingHealth’s Mobile Inpatient Care @ Home, which has become a mainstream model of care in our public healthcare institutions earlier this month. This initiative is part of SingHealth@Home, and patients will be able to receive the relevant suite of services including hospital care, specialist services and rehabilitation supported by the hospitals’ clinical teams and community care teams enabled by digital technologies. These teams will visit the patients at regular intervals to deliver treatment as required. Patients’ clinical parameters can be monitored virtually, and they will have access to 24//7 care hotlines which will enable speedy responses for those who need it.

Our healthcare professionals are key to excellent care and our team has been exploring technologies that can make care safer, while enhancing the delivery and quality of healthcare services. The team has been prototyping and trialling different innovations to facilitate hospital operations and care delivery and I am proud to share that many of these innovations are what we term “frugal innovations”, which use cost-effective and readily available products, powered by creative engineering design, to become potential healthcare and operational solutions.

For example, the use of low-cost commercial cameras coupled with sensors to do multiple tasks, such as checking whether patients are getting up from their beds while monitoring the temperature levels in a room through the use of thermo-sensitive materials. If you are curious about these innovations, do visit the showcases at the EGH Healthcare Living Lab after the ceremony.

Building a Hospital with the Community

Third, and most importantly, to reach out and engage the community around us. We may be familiar with the saying that it takes a “kampung”, or a village, to raise a child. By the same thread, it takes a kampung to build a Healthier SG, where we work together to keep our families, neighbours and friends healthy as long as possible. The EGH Campus hopes to be a key member of the kampung in the east, where we function as a catalyst for the health and wellness of present and future residents in the east. We also aim to nurture the kampung spirit with our community within and outside the hospital while we aspire to international standards of care.

We have and will continue to engage community partners and stakeholders such as primary care providers, Active Ageing Centres, grassroots organisations and the Silver Generation Office to enhance the health of our patients and community beyond the walls of the hospital.

We want to empower residents to take charge of their health so that they can be cared for primarily in the community setting, while the EGH Campus acts as a strong safety net to provide high quality care for those whose conditions are best managed in hospitals. We will enable seamless access to our hospitals for these patients. As patients recover and are fit for care in the community, we want them to experience a smooth transition from the hospital setting back into their homes, supported by a dedicated team of healthcare professionals. The team will work with primary care providers to ensure that patients complete their recovery journey well, and link them with the relevant community partners and social service agencies to support them to keep well and stay well in their communities.

Conclusion

It takes a robust and diverse ecosystem of healthcare professionals and providers, community organisations and stakeholders to build a new hospital campus. I would like to take this moment to thank our partners and friends who have been pivotal in our journey thus far – Minister Ong, MOH and MOH Holdings and the SingHealth Board for their guidance and strong support in building the hospitals; our healthcare counterparts in SingHealth and other healthcare clusters for their gracious collaboration; our grassroots and community partners for helping us get to know the ground and bridge connections with residents and the community, and their overwhelming response in supporting this event by setting up booths; our friendly neighbours for being so welcoming and bearing with us as construction takes place; our contractors and consultants for their hard work; the residents and community of this area whom we look forward to meet and serve, and so many more. I hope that today’s event is the start of many more dynamic and meaningful collaborations to build a kampung spirit, to shape the future of healthcare in the east together.

In closing, I hope you will enjoy yourselves today engaging with the EGH Campus team and our community partners, and learn more about the hospitals at our EGH Campus showcase and have fun at the activity booths.

Thank you.