YAP BAO SHEN

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. My group was tasked to adapt existing resources and create forms of media that can fit into the plan to make the polyclinic a go-to place to find updated information on illnesses and good health practices. Our final deliverable was supposed to entail a creative presentation in the form of a brochure, video, poster, or any other forms of media suitable for the polyclinic.

Above: Interactive displays at Marine Parade Polyclinic for patient satisfaction feedback.

The steps to completing the project were to be:

· Conducting interviews at various polyclinics to determine our course of action and the form of media we were to create.

· Brainstorming on what the content of given media was to be.

· Creating media and self-evaluation within the group.

· Presentation of media to teacher mentors and other WOW! Groups.

The purpose of conducting interviews at polyclinics was to find our target demographic for our forms of media, as well as to find out which media forms people were more receptive of. The purpose of self-evaluation was to ensure the quality of the final product, as well as have leeway to change our course of action mid-project if need be. As it turns out, a change of media form was implemented midway into the month, and we had to scramble for new information and sources. Without our action plan to self-evaluate and reconsider our projects, this efficient change of plan would not be possible.

In the end, we decided on 2 forms of media: a poster, and an animated video. The poster was to be about the currently trending topic of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, and the video was to be about mental health and breaking the stigma against it.

We went to work in designing the poster and the storyboard of the video, and after some consultation with Dr Peter Moey our external mentor, the video’s storyboard was altered to more properly show how people with mental health issues act and show symptoms of their deteriorating mental health. However, time management and practicality also played a big factor. The original plan for the video was to hand-draw it frame by frame and animate it that way, but after we started, we realized that it was absolutely unrealistic to complete in our short one-month time frame. Thus, a week before the deadline, a decision was made to switch the topic of the video completely and start from scratch.

The new video was to be about diabetic patients and different treatments of kidney failure. We already had some prerequisite knowledge on the topic from our learning journey in IP2 to the National Kidney Foundation, and so research on this topic was less extensive. We knew that diabetic patients regularly visited polyclinics, and thus we thought the video was relevant enough to be worth putting in the effort to. However, an oversight that was made was the general demographic of these diabetic patients. When we conducted our interviews, everyone we spoke to spoke English as their primary language, including elderly patients we spoke to. We did not consider that some of the diabetic patients did not speak English and created the video with a target demographic of the English-speaking general public.

Thus, we presented our poster and video to our teacher mentors and other SingHealth Polyclinics groups on 31 Jan 2020.

Above: Our poster on the current global emergency of the Wuhan novel coronavirus.

3 content knowledge/skills learnt:

· How a polyclinic functions and its various specialized facilities (lab testing for urine samples, an X-ray machine for scanning)

· How posters are designed to be put in polyclinics (posters usually do not show death counts or anything that would majorly scare patients, and this may be to keep patients calm and not overreact in response to small symptoms or issues.)

How polyclinics are more technologically advanced than I assumed. The last time I visited a polyclinic was over 10 years ago, and back then the waiting times and consultation procedures involved a lot of manual writing down on cards and confusion. Nowadays, there are self-serve kiosks (ordering kiosks ala McDonald’s) to book consultations, as well as the PILbox for patients to collect their medications on another day without waiting an hour for the procedures to go through the pharmacy.