TAN QIAN XUN

Background Information of Our Project

Clinics are necessary to offer medical aid to the people. It originally came in the form of outdoor patient dispensaries (OPD) and maternal and child health services(MCH). Eventually due to the huge increase in population and increased needs, they came up with the concept of polyclinics.

The first official polyclinic was built at Toa Payoh in 1978. The success of this first model brought about the reorganization and combination of 41 OPDs and MCH in the 1980s to form 16 polyclinics. In October 2000, there was an official formation of two clusters - National Healthcare Group and SingHealth. SingHealth Polyclinics is a member of Singapore Health Services (SingHealth) which is an Academic Medical Centre offering clinical and medical services through a network of acute hospitals, national specialty centres, community hospitals and polyclinics.

Singhealth provides a wide range of medical treatments. It became increasingly refined over the years and continues improving and catering to patients’ needs. As technology improved, so did the efficiency of the clinics. On top of outdoor patient dispensaries and maternal and child health services, it offered other services that range from psychiatric care to health screenings.

Singhealth has accomplished much through the years, on top of helping to deal with the daily patients and their problems, they helped many people through tough times such as haze, SARs and most recently, the Wuhan virus.

Singhealth’s main aims are to provide primary healthcare services and it plays an integral role in empowering patients, their families and communities to take charge of their health and wellness by delivering seamless, person-centred and preventive healthcare.

The aspect of singhealth that fascinated me the most was the development of the system as whole. The progress of Singhealth is admirable. The crucial health issues are ever changing and the way the polyclinics adapt so quickly really impressed me. For instance, some of the major challenges faced today include more mental health issues, ageing population and diabetes. This was a major shift from the major issues of the past that included issues such as tuberculosis and malaria. The healthcare system has adapted to the problems and even major epidemics such as SARS relatively quick and efficiently. It caters to such a wide range of health problems and their determination towards finding solutions to problems are really amazing.

To name the example that was most relevant to our project, the creation of the singhealth app health buddy. After feedback about queues being too long and the repeated emphasis on reducing time spent, they decided to create the app to tackle these issues. This was just one of the many examples of them working on improvement and to me, that was the most interesting aspect of the whole Singhealth scape.

background information of our project

The aim of our project was to identify the needs of patients and with the end user in mind, create an app/ video that helps patients learn and acts as a form of self-help. We had the end in mind right from the start and there was a clear goal. I will be elaborating more on this later on.

Our resources were all digital/ done through the internet. The main resources fundamentally comprise of two elements: the research/ database and the programming aspect. So the internet was almost all the resources that we needed.

elaboration of activities completed

Our first step was to identify a problem that we wanted to work on. It had to be relevant to the challenges faced by the medical industry today and we also understood that our end product was an app. Hence after a bit of brainstorming, we decided to generate a solution to the problem of technological complications faced by the elderly via an app. This idea of ours seemed to be the perfect fusion between all our main considerations.

It was more complicated than simply coming up with such an idea. We had to develop it and add more details and plans. We also asked ourselves what the selling point of our app was? After all, so many health resources such as health buddy already exist. In the end we decided to go towards the direction of compilation, simplification and organization. We decided that our project would benefit the general public, but was elder friendly too. After decided on objectives and setting a basis for the project, we started adding details and discussions.

Eventually we decided to split it into two aspects-There was the programming aspect of the project and there was the research aspect of the project. Since I personally was not good at programming, I handled the organization, planning, the art, and part of the research. With the work split, the weeks involved more hard work. Some challenges faced include choosing a suitable app to make the app, finding and gathering all the necessary information etc.

After a new concept of gamification was brought up and solidified, we decided to embark on more, Within a week we repeated our process and managed to finish the rough idea of the game. This too involved research, finding out what types of games the older generation would enjoy, fun medical facts and so on.

Finally the last week involved more rushing since programming is no easy feat and to program a game and app within a month was trying. Eventually the two were preoccupied with that task so I did the slides and script.

Thankfully, albeit a little rough, the project was completed. Now I will be elaborating on the impact of our app AKA our end product.

The main purpose of the app is to be as user friendly as possible while still effectively tackling medical needs and so on. We did so by compiling all the resources on medical related information into one app.

The main features will be the sorting function that lets you sort by symptoms and alphabetically. (In general categories it for easy finding). The first prompt will also be asking if patient experiences any of the five symptoms that need immediate/ urgent medical attention and if so they should visit the doctor. Sorting by symptoms is intended to help patients identify the illness they are experiencing. Of course, due to limited time we were not able to include the full extent of all illnesses, symptoms and summaries of each link. We wanted to include a brief summary, a condensation of information alongside each link since the information on the websites can sometimes be a bit overwhelming with the high content of words and so on. This summary will help to convey the necessary information and those who do not need details will be spared from the long paragraph of words.

Health tips and useful links are expanded scopes. Going beyond illnesses, we feel it is still important to know how to maintain one’s health.

We have also included bookmarks which are part of the idea of personalization and lets users have easy access to links/information that is most relevant to them

. We also included a did you know on the loading screen not just for fun but rather to clear up common misconceptions such as the misunderstanding regarding the antibiotics’ usefulness.

Should we take this further and expand our scope, other features we would consider are maps of the clinics to help with navigation, different languages option and audio aid for those who prefer audio to visual. (since we aim to help the older generation in particular) and in general, polish the app’s designs and make sure it runs smoothly without bugs.

Content/skills learnt

Now, moving on to the more personal aspect of the project. I have learnt a lot from this meaningful experience. I came into this project not expecting much since I was not very interested in the medical field. However, this experience really opened my eyes. The relevance of all the things I learnt really piqued my interest. The problems all relate back to real life and it helped me view things from a different perspective.

I would say the key takeaways from this project are learning how to plan ahead, learning how to work as a team efficiently and understanding more of Singapore’s medical industry.

Planning ahead has always been important in each project but for this one in particular, it was crucial to the success of the project. The details were essential since programming an app needs a fully fleshed out plan rather than a rough idea. This project really forced me to plan more and think ahead. I had to organize it in the most cohesive manner possible whether its by flow chart or point form.

Learning how to work as a team was another takeaway. My group was cooperative so there was no trouble with that. However, working as a team also involved splitting tasks. Some tasks were complicated and could not be split. This includes the programming of the app as it could not be worked on at the same time. Therefore, there as additional need to learn to split the tasks for maximum efficiency and since we had very limited time.

Last but not least, understanding more of Singapore’s medical industry and polyclinics were major takeaways from the whole experience. Prior to this, I did not have much knowledge of the medical industry. I rarely visited the polyclinics and/or hospital and my family did not either. Due to this, I knew close to nothing about polyclinics and the help offered. Some of the knowledge seem like general knowledge to other people but not to me. Learning more about the variety of help offered by the polyclinic was great. We even had an exclusive look behind the scenes, seeing how the polyclinic system operated from the booking of appointment to consultation to prescription and that was fascinating to me. Personally I appreciate the attention to detail most. Small design choices that most would not think too much about but all of it adds up and boosts efficiency. A prime example of this was when Dr Moey told us about how in the past, when the lab tests were run the nurses had to run from one room to another to hand over the sample. After the design change by adding a counter and window between the two rooms, things went much better. Now they could simply pass the sample over without running back and forth. All in all, learning more about polyclinics and the medical industry was an enriching experience.

other learning aspects

In hindsight, the nurses, doctors and medical staff have done so much for Singapore. It is a shame that there is lesser recognition of this fact but personally, I appreciate them so much more after the WOW! experience. Hearing stories and finding out that they often worked overtime, I now know how hard they work to keep everyone healthy. Their efforts are admirable and in spite of it all, they really pulled through. I hope that more appreciation will be shown to them in the future.

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