In initiating the plans and maintaining them, lots of efforts are being made by people who are not always acknowledged. However, these people are really the ones who allow the system to flow so smoothly to the benefit of the general public. Although many times, when I visit the hospital or polyclinics, I see videos which seem very simple and easy to make, those videos actually require a lot of hard work and planning to make sure it answers to the needs and wants of the public, and are able to captivate them while still sending the message across. This process also requires creativity and a complete understanding of what happens in the healthcare system and how people view healthcare, and this knowledge is then used to initiate brand new ideas and schemes. I admire such people as they are so fluid and creative (able to come up with new and good ideas). I have always found schemes very useful to the public as by knowing how such schemes can help one, one can then be aware of the most convenient and low-cost path in healthcare available to them. Familiar taglines like the Chinese “建国配套，陪你到老” are all created by these people, and as previous government campaigns have proven, really cause an impact on people’s lifestyles and how they approach their problem. An ability to impact lives like this, to me, is astonishing and amazing.

The main focus of this project, we delved into how the General Practitioner (GP) clinics are able to provide for people’s chronic conditions. GPs are trained to help people better handle their condition. Also, the government has put in many facilities like Community Health Centres that can be found all over Singapore to assist the GPs in diagnosis. Schemes that group GPs together to allow them to have greater buying power and to share resources are also implemented to allow GPs to be able to provide lower cost, and higher quality services to the public. (Greater buying power = cheaper pharmaceutical drugs = lower cost for consumers and also means GPs are able to provide more to customers for less price on their part, hence an increase in quality of healthcare).

Many people think GPs are not capable of helping them, but even chronic conditions like diabetes can be followed-up in the GPs, and the concept of one family doctor for each person, to ensure a holistic healthcare service where the doctor knows your whole family history and is thus able to provide better diagnosis and treatment for a person, I feel, is a really good concept that would raise the health standards of people in Singapore.

I also learnt a lot about the healthcare system in Singapore, for example, how they group patients into different priorities depending on their severity, and thus navigate patients through the different routes in healthcare. There are still many other programmes that some may not know of, but are put in place to help residents of Singapore access quality healthcare.

There are many things I learnt about formatting a presentation. From the start, the slides should not be too wordy – as quoted by my mentor: “Nowadays infographics are a trend.” The slides should be presented such that the audience is able to understand what you are talking about at any given time, by including captions for photos used and not including too much information on the slides that may steal the attention of the audience. Do not use rival company’s photos, have an agenda slide etc. And for survey results – graphs should be in ascending/descending order, colour should be standardised, title of the charts should be the question asked, the sample size should be stated etc. I don’t think I would learn such skills from school, a non-working environment, and I am very glad I learnt these skills from my mentors while I had the opportunity to do so.

Such a job requires a lot of creativity as many of the people working there are in charge of the ideation and implementation of the programmes to better the system.

On 2 occasions, my mentors have told me how they need new, fresh minds to help them think of new ideas to promote their cause because many of them “have been on this job for so long, so all (their) ideas are already there”. I understand from them how difficult it is to continually push for ideas even if they do not see an improvement in the cause and how difficult it must be to keep thinking of new ideas. I admire their passion and the amount of effort they must put in to keep the programme ongoing. However, when their programme garners a lot of support, and they are able to help people with it, I am very sure that it gives them a lot of satisfaction.

This job requires quite a great depth of knowledge in this field, and the people working in the department have to also know how the public thinks, so as to, in combining their knowledge of the situation and the healthcare needs, together with the social aspect of publicising the programme, push for their cause in an efficient way. I am very inspired by how their job is so people-focused.

My mentors were highly fluent in English, Mandarin and Malay, and are thus able to help and target people of different ethnic backgrounds. This made me realise the importance of language and studying our mother tongue, especially when working in this field, and serving the public in Singapore.

Also, I learnt that in this job, one must be very organised in order to get the product done. From planning to research to surveys to creating a product or campaign and getting approval while making sure all the content put up is not offensive or inaccurate, one must keep track of the whole experience to make sure everything goes according to plan. My mentor is incredibly meticulous – from the first day, she gave us a timetable that planned out whatever we were going to do for each day we went to work and that made our experience so much better! Even after each presentation she guided us and gave us feedback on how to improve, and she was with us every step of the way. We are very grateful to have had such a planned and organised experience (that included presentations for us to learn about the system!) that allowed us to learn as much as we could.