Page 4106 - Week 12 - Thursday, 1 December 2022
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We then visited Bukit Canberra, a health and wellbeing precinct that integrates a range of community facilities, including health services and a senior care centre, hawker markets, community farms and green space, as well as indoor and outdoor sporting facilities, including two swimming pools. The site is named after Canberra House, which sits at the top of the hill, or Bukit, which in turn is named in honour of the visit of the first the original HMAS Canberra to Singapore in September 1937.
The precinct is an example of a whole-of-government approach to delivering integrated community facilities and is intended to represent one of the Beyonds; namely, beyond healthcare to health. For example, the onsite health services enable wellbeing, connection and exercise to be integrated into the prescriptions issued by healthcare workers—a unique approach to social prescribing.
Later that day we visited a public polyclinic operated by National University Polyclinics. Polyclinics are an innovative model of care in Singapore that provide comprehensive health care, including medical, allied health, dental, diagnostic, pharmacy and financial counselling services. Like all Australian jurisdictions, the ACT is facing increased pressures on our primary care sector and acute care sectors. This site visit provided insights into designs for future community health services and opportunities to continue to align the ACT’s health services with our vision in Accessible, accountable, sustainable: a framework for the ACT public health system 2020-2030 in managing treatment and care across the community.
On the third and final day of the trade mission, the ACT delegation visited the Centre for Healthcare Innovation in Tan Tock Seng Hospital. The hospital is one of the largest in Singapore and is known as a healthcare leader in population health, systems innovation, health technologies and workforce transformation. The hospital had just gone live with its Epic Digital Health Record software in the week prior. This provided us with an opportunity to learn about its experience, to anticipate and manage its implementation for the ACT go-live.
We also visited a Centre for Healthcare Innovation on the hospital campus to observe the application of technology to deliver integrated patient-centred health services. This centre takes a genuinely multidisciplinary approach that engages staff across the hospital in thinking creatively about how to improve care in the hospital setting and, critically, going beyond the hospital to the community.
Our trade mission concluded with a visit to the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. This academic medical centre is a strategic partnership between SingHealth and the Duke-NUS Medical School that integrates clinical care, education and research to deliver improved healthcare and patient outcomes. One executive spoke of a philosophy at the centre: “We don’t just want to practice medicine; we want to improve it.”
The centre gives rise to a student population where they begin a journey of academic medical practice that continues right throughout a clinician’s career. The academic medical program has been instrumental in creating a desire for healthcare workers to join and remain in the public health system. SingHealth officials told us they have no challenges in recruiting or retaining their workforce. This is an enviable position to be
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