Every day, Ms Li Yuk, 37, traverses Singapore with a mini hospital ward tucked in her bag.
Among the contents are a stethoscope, wound dressing sets and equipment to measure blood pressure and blood sugar levels.
Ms Li is a patient navigator from the National Heart Centre Singapore - a nurse who serves as a bridge between hospital and home.
She checks on seniors at home to make sure they are getting all they need, whether it is the right dose of medication or regular meals.
Although bathing her patients or cleaning their homes is not part of the job, she often finds herself having to go above and beyond the call of duty.
Ms Li recalled an incident when she and a fellow nurse entered a house and found a man in urine-soaked pants.
He refused to take a shower because he had no heater at home. So they painstakingly boiled kettles of water to bathe him.
In another case, a patient had accidentally spilled oily chicken soup all over the floor.
"In the hospital, if the floor is dirty, we would just call the cleaner," Ms Li said. "It's not our job to clean the house, but if we hadn't, he might have fallen."
She and the other patient navigators typically make three to four home visits a day, spending about an hour at each person's home.
Some patients need help with changing the dressing on their wounds. Others are on many different medications and get confused about what to take.
One of her main challenges, Ms Li said, is getting patients to comply with medical instructions.
For example, those with heart or kidney failure are often told to limit the amount of fluids they drink as this can lead to water retention.
This is an easy restriction to follow in the hospital, but harder when patients are at home.
"They tell you that they won't take too much fluids. Then, two days later, they tell you that their legs are swollen and they are breathless," she said.
Still, she finds the job meaningful and worries about her patients when their health takes a turn for the worse.
"They are like our family members," she said.
Linette Lai
