Graduation Ceremony For Health Care Assistants

21 Mar 2005

By Dr Balaji Sadasivan, Senior Minister Of State For Information, Communications And The Arts and Health

Venue: Institute Of Mental Health

Good afternoon,

Dr Lim Suet Wun, CEO NHG

Mr Leong Yew Meng CEO IMH,

A/Prof Wong Kim Eng, CMB IMH, and

Dr Gan See Khem, Executive Chairman and Managing Director of Health Management International Ltd (HMI).

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

It is my pleasure to be here at IMH's Graduation Ceremony for its Health Care Assistants (HCAs).

I understand that some family members of the graduates are here today. I share in your joy as your loved ones begin their new career in the health care sector.

The labour market today is constantly evolving. While new jobs are being created in some sectors, other jobs are being lost. Our challenge is to help those who have lost their jobs to take on new jobs in sectors where jobs are plentiful but lack workers with the necessary skills. Another challenge is to re-engineer jobs. By that I mean to take low skilled unattractive jobs currently filled by foreign workers and convert them to higher skilled and more productive jobs that Singaporeans will find attractive.

Health care is a sector that is not only labour intensive, but also requires workers with specialised skills. For many years, Singapore faced a shortage of healthcare workers, especially nurses. The shortage exists up to today. As Singapore takes steps to become a medical hub, we will need even more health care workers to fill both traditional and new roles. One way to meet this shortage is to continue to rely on foreign workers. But this is not sustainable as there is a global shortage of healthcare workers. An alternate solution is to attract and enable more Singaporeans to take up roles in health care. Today's graduation ceremony is the result of a step in this direction.

At IMH, the role of a Health Care Assistant was only created in 2001 after it was restructured on 1 October 2000. IMH started recruiting Health Care Assistants to augment the acute shortage of nursing staff. At that time however, the hospital had great difficulty in recruiting and training local workers to carry out the Health Care Assistant's role and thus had to turn to health care workers from the Philippines to fill these positions.

Seeing the demand for trained health care assistants, organisations such as Health Management International (HMI) started its training arm, HMI Institute of Health Sciences (HMI-IHS) in 2002 and introduced the Inpatient Care Assistant Course to retrain retrenched and unemployed workers to work in the healthcare industry.

As a result, today, hospitals are beginning to recruit more Singaporeans to do the job. I am heartened to know that at IMH, close to 50% of the Health Care Assistants are Singaporeans. I was told that just three years ago, all were foreigners.

IMH has taken the initiative to help Singaporeans take up jobs in the health care sector a step further. Since the psychiatric setting needs special skills, IMH collaborated with HMI-Institute of Health Sciences to customize its three-month course to make it more relevant for psychiatric inpatient care. This ensured that the Health Care Assistants would be able to do a better job in delivering quality care to patients

IMH is also the first employer to work with HMI-Institute of Health Sciences to offer the Inpatient Care Assistant course based on a "place-and-train" model. In this model, candidates are first offered employment, then, sent for training to acquire the necessary skills to perform their new roles as Health Care Assistants. IMH pays these staff a salary while they undergo training. The conventional route is to "train-and-place" where job seekers get themselves trained first and then try to secure jobs with their new skills. This meant that while job seekers had invested time and money to acquire a new skill, it did not necessarily guarantee them a job after training. The "place and train" model assures workers of a job at the end of their training.

Through this "place-and-train" model, IMH has successfully helped 49 workers to become Health Care Assistants. Nineteen of them had earlier graduated in January 2005 and are performing well in their work.

I congratulate the 30 Health Care Assistants graduating today and those who had graduated earlier. I believe many of you are in your late 30s and 40s, with mature work attitudes and real-life working experience. You came from various sectors but had no prior health care experience. Yet, you were undaunted and took up the challenge to learn new skills to make that mid-career change. Today, you are graduating with new skills and new jobs. I applaud you for being pragmatic and moving ahead with the changing employment landscape.

Being a Health Care Assistant can be a stepping stone towards a rewarding career in health care. Health Care Assistants who excel in their work can be further sponsored to upgrade their skills to become enrolled nurses or registered nurses.

Finally, I congratulate IMH and the HMI-Institute of Health Sciences. What you have achieved through job re-engineering and the "place and train" program is commendable and should serve as a model for other hospitals and nursing homes to follow.

I would like to conclude by wishing all the Health Care Assistants the very best as you embark on your new careers. Welcome to the health care community.

Thank you.