WHO recognises Singapore as leader in helping patients by connecting them to community resources

SINGAPORE - SingHealth Community Hospitals (SCH), which in 2019 started connecting discharged patients with social and fitness activities in the community to support their health, has been appointed as a World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Social Prescribing – the first centre of its kind in the world.

This was announced at the inaugural Asia Pacific Population Health Conference and second Asia Pacific Social Prescribing Conference on Nov 28.

The two-day joint conference, held at the Academia at the Singapore General Hospital Campus, was organised by the SingHealth Regional Health System (RHS) and SCH.

Social prescribing is a care model where patients are connected with suitable resources in the community with the aim of addressing their social needs, such as those related to mental health.

SCH’s appointment is a recognition of its substantial work in this field, said Health Minister Ong Ye Kung at the event.

Over the past two years, Singapore has seen major changes in healthcare policies, centring on population health and social prescribing, and its social prescribing efforts are cascading to individual institutions, including SingHealth, he said.

To support wider adoption of social prescribing nationwide, the SCH Office of Learning has worked with partners to roll out training programmes on social prescribing that cater to a wide range of professionals, including general practitioners, community care providers, social workers and volunteers, Mr Ong added.

Associate Professor Lee Kheng Hock, SCH’s deputy chief executive (education and community partnerships) and one of the heads of the new WHO Collaborating Centre for Social Prescribing, told The Straits Times that SCH’s appointment, for four years from Nov 14, cements the recognition of Singapore as a world leader in this area.

“The reputation of Healthier SG (the preventative care strategy of which social prescribing is an element), the work that we do, all come together to create this confluence of factors and get us designated as a collaborative centre,” he said.

Singapore has 10 other WHO collaborating centres in other domains, including health promotion and disease prevention, bioethics, digital health and health education.

Today, SingHealth has 120 well-being coordinators in its clinical teams, including 12 at SCH, who are trained to screen patients for social health risk factors.

If needed, they may even accompany an elderly person living alone to an active ageing centre for the first time, said Prof Lee.

In some cases, the problem the patient has might actually be loneliness, he said.

“So (we want to find out) what is the activity that this person is willing to participate in? And in doing the activity, we can connect them to a social group near their house and decrease their social isolation,” Prof Lee added.

It is also not about simply giving advice, which is easily ignored, he said.

“Even if you give them a referral form, they may never show up. So it is to actually hand-hold them to close the last mile, as someone in the community can... encourage them to continue.

“This is actually the critical part, and probably the most difficult part to do.”

Indeed, there is an art to social prescribing.

Basically, focus on what matters to the person, rather than on what the matters are, Professor Sir Sam Everington, the vice-chair of North East London Clinical Commission Group and a GP at a health centre at Bromley by Bow in Britain, said in the keynote speech. Britain was first to popularise social prescribing.

Getting the patients on board by building a partnership with them in the process is also important, he said.

At SCH, social prescribing started on a very small scale in 2019.

It was also a very labour-intensive process, said the other head of the new centre, Ms Adeline Kwan, assistant director at SCH’s Office of Community Engagement and Education.

The community linkages today have increased because there are more well-being coordinators, more training and more innovation, she said, as SCH is co-developing a so-called living asset map of community resources to support social prescribing.

On Nov 28, SingHealth also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Singapore University of Social Sciences and Singapore University of Technology and Design to address the gaps in population health efforts through a White Paper and implementation plan.

One of the tripartite’s initiatives is to set up real-world test beds for community efforts, or what it calls the Healthy, Empowered and Active Living laboratories.

SingHealth has set up two such labs in Marine Parade and Bedok, and will set up four more in other areas, to study the effectiveness of the community initiatives implemented in these places. 

The initiatives include a micro job scheme for seniors, who are paid a small sum for delivering food and other such jobs.

If the initiatives work, they can then be scaled up, said Associate Professor Low Lian Leng, the director of SingHealth’s Centre for Population Health Research and Implementation, on the sidelines of the event.