SOH JUE NING

Background info

Singapore Health Services (commonly abbreviated as SingHealth) is Singapore’s largest cluster of healthcare institutions. SingHealth operates SingHealth Polyclinics, a network of primary care polyclinics largely situated in the southeast, east, and northeast Singapore. They provide primary care services to the population in those areas, and also provide training for aspiring family medicine physicians.

Background info of the project/task assigned

We were assigned to collect information on why polyclinics were built; whether they replaced some other medical community service centre; the overall healthcare plan for screening and treatment of health problems and the positioning of polyclinics in this plan; the types of services available and the costs of these services; the demographic that the polyclinics were designed to serve; any updates to the role of these polyclinics; interesting stories from those who worked in polyclinics. We also had to provide suggestions on how to enhance the experience of being in a polyclinic. We decided to present our findings via a website which could educate people while giving them a glimpse of how polyclinics were like in the past.

Timeline

Week 1:

We first went to Pasir Ris polyclinic to meet our mentor Dr Peter Moey. He gave us a presentation about the new Eunos polyclinic that he was in charge of, and also gave a tour of the polyclinic. After that we interviewed Nurse Manager Ng, who shared her experiences working in the old Still Road polyclinic. On the second day, our group met up to do research and answer questions pertaining to the history and role of Singhealth Polyclinics (eg. whether polyclinics replaced other medical centres, and the types of services provided at polyclinics). We split up the research and each person answered a few questions. We also discussed about what questions we wanted to ask the patients and staff we were going to interview the next day. On the third day, we went to Outram polyclinic to interview Mr Tian Hock, who previously worked at Still Road polyclinic. He recounted his experiences as a pharmacy technician and talked about how polyclinics used to work in the past. We went to Bedok polyclinic on the fourth day to conduct an interview with the patients there to find out how they felt about their experience there. The interview questions we asked them were:

1. What is your age group? (Eg. 20-25, 25-30, 30-35 etc)
2. What difficulties/issues/inconveniences have you encountered while in a polyclinic?
3. What are some improvements in the use of space in the polyclinic? What would you change in this polyclinic?
4. What are some interesting stories or memorable experiences you had in a polyclinic?
5. Do you think the cost of polyclinics is reasonable? Why/why not?
6. With rising affluence, more and more people are turning to private healthcare, do you think having more polyclinics is still necessary?

Lastly, we went to Marine Parade polyclinic to interview 2 of the nurses who worked there.

Week 2:

We went to the library at Our Tampines Hub(OTH) to discuss and plan what to put in the website. We also decided to use the website creator wix.com to make our website. We went to Bedok polyclinic to meet Dr Moey to show him our progress so far, and also started adding our content onto the website. We went to OTH to plan how to film clips to put on our website, and continue working on the website.

Week 3:

We went to Pasir Ris polyclinic to start filming the clips for our website. These clips would show the interesting experiences that the staff had encountered previously.However, the clips we had filmed could not be viewed due to some error so we had to refilm the clips. As Dr Moey had told us not to return to the polyclinics due to the spread of the Covid-19 virus, we decided to just refilm the clips in school. Hence we went to school to film and edit the clips. We also finished up the website and uploaded all the information onto it.

Deliverables

Our end result was a website which displayed information about Singhealth Polyclinics such as the treatments available, their different locations, and also FAQs to provide additional support.

Website link: https://shp002.wixsite.com/acetjcians

The website consisted mainly of 5 tabs:

1.Home page

2."Our stories" page

3."Contact us" page

4.Frequently asked questions(FAQ) page

5.Feedback page

Content knowledge / Skills learnt

The 3 main things I have learnt from this experience were:

1. Adaptability

When interviewing the staff and patients, some of them spoke in different languages, or did not understand the questions that we asked them. We had to quickly think of how to ask our questions in a way that was easy for them to understand. Secondly, after finding out that the videos we filmed of the interesting stories at Pasir Ris polyclinic could not be loaded, we had to adapt to the situation and were able to reshoot the scenes in school while still managing to keep within our deadline.

2. Work ethic

Before this experience, I had already known that the jobs of those working in healthcare were not easy, however after seeing them on the job firsthand, I realised that their jobs were much more difficult than I had imagined. The different types of treatments and the number of medications they had to memorise and understand was astounding. In addition, they were always polite in dealing with all patients and treated them with the utmost respect no matter how they themselves were treated. They also had to be very efficient and make important decisions quickly eg. diagnosis, so their decision making skills were also super good. Hence, it would take a lot of dedication and hard work to be able to work in the healthcare sector, and these people absolutely deserve all the credit given.

3. Teamwork

Although our time management skills were not the best, we managed to finish our project before the deadline as we divided the different tasks among ourselves and cooperated well with each other to produce good results. Hence, teamwork was the main component in helping us complete all out tasks and working through any problems along the way.

Interesting aspects learnt

An interesting fact I learnt was that in the past, the nurses used to do medical consultations for the patients instead of doctors. The doctors would usually only see the patients if it was a more serious case. Now, doctors are the ones usually giving medical consultations for the patients instead of the nurses. MCH clinics and polyclinics used to only have 1 doctor in the past. Currently, there are about 10 doctors in small clinics, but in bigger polyclinics such as Tampines Polyclinic and Bedok Polyclinic, there will be about 19-20 doctors. In the MCH clinics, there will be about 2 nursing officers, several staff nurses, 1 midwife and 2 nurses. There were no pharmacists and only had 1 pharmacy technician. There would be several hundreds of patients each day.

The attitude of patients has also changed a lot in recent years. In the past, patients would just accept what the nurses/doctors say and believe the doctor's word. However, nowadays they deny the doctors diagnosis and try to use google or their own limited knowledge to challenge the nurses/doctors. They are also more demanding. Patients used to be more grateful towards the staff and would always thank them before leaving. A lot of patients now would just walk off without giving thanks. Last time, patients would wait for their turn without any complaints, however nowadays if they have to wait 10 minutes more for their appointment they would already start to complain.

Takeaways for life

I learnt that we should never just assume things when we do not know what really goes on. Many people tend to assume that doctors and other medical related professions are easy, however they do not see the hard work that goes behind it and even expect so much of them. Hence, I feel that we should never take these people for granted as they have dedicated their lives towards helping others, and we should always be grateful towards them and show them the respect they deserve.