SingHealth nurses to get $5.7m from Wee Foundation for education, skills development
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Wee Foundation director Wee Wei Ling and Senior Minister of State for Health Tan Kiat How serving a nurse food during the SingHealth Nurses' Day celebrations.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
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SINGAPORE – SingHealth nurses will be receiving a further $5.7 million from the Wee Foundation to advance their education and provide them with more training opportunities.
This comes after the charitable organisation gave the healthcare cluster’s nurses $5 million for educational and professional development in 2022, when it established a nursing academic fund for that purpose.
Wee Foundation director Wee Wei Ling told The Straits Times on July 29: “Nurses are the backbone of healthcare, providing selfless dedication. They go out of their way, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, working day and night caring for the sick.
“The Wee Foundation felt they deserve our help in providing them with scholarships to further their studies and funding for innovations.”
Linked to the late Dr Wee Cho Yaw, a banker and philanthropist, the Wee Foundation was set up in February 2009 with an initial $30 million endowment from the Wee family.
The charitable foundation focuses on education and welfare for the underprivileged, and also promotes Chinese language and culture, as well as social integration.
In 2022, the Wee Foundation Nursing Academic Fund was established with an inaugural $5 million to advance nurses’ capabilities through higher education and postgraduate studies. It also offered them training grants to become competent in areas such as digitalisation, artificial intelligence, robotics and global health.
Since then, the fund has helped 970 SingHealth nurses through different educational opportunities.
One of them is Ms Reina Cheong, 26, a staff nurse at Singapore General Hospital.
Ms Cheong, who used to spend long hours draining fluid from the abdomen of patients with abdominal swelling, felt there was a safer and more efficient way of doing this.
Ms Reina Cheong, a staff nurse at Singapore General Hospital, is developing a mechanical pump to make it safer and more efficient to drain excess fluid from the abdomen of patients with abdominal swelling.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
“Draining this fluid manually is time-consuming and needs the constant attention of the nurse, especially when large amounts of fluid are involved,” she said.
Ms Cheong explained that the rate at which fluid is removed is crucial because “too much and too fast can result in a drop in blood pressure and, in severe cases, hypovolaemic shock”, a life-threatening condition when the body loses too much blood or fluid.
She came up with the idea of a mechanical device that automatically stops when the drainage reaches the safe limit and pitched this solution at the 2024 SingHealth Nursing Innovation Challenge.
Her team was later given seed funding for a feasible pilot project.
Ms Cheong is currently working with a firm to develop her pump.
A total of 116 nurses received the Wee Foundation Nurses’ Day Awards on July 29, and another 32 nurses were given Wee Foundation Nursing Scholarships to further their studies.
