Plenary Session on "Diaspora Partnership In Healthcare"

07 Jan 2006

By Dr Balaji Sadasivan, Senior Minister of State for Information, Communications and the Arts and Health

Venue: Hyderabad, India

Chairman,

Distinguished Guests, speakers and friends

Thank you for inviting me to speak at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2006 and allowing me to share my views on Diaspora partnership in Healthcare from a Singapore perspective. I have met Indians who were born in India, grew up in India and who have become very successful outside India. Some live in Singapore. They tell me they are part of the Indian Diaspora. I was born in Singapore and grew up in Singapore. I tell them I am a result of the Diaspora. Throughout Southeast Asia, you can find the results of the Diaspora.

The history of the Indian Diaspora and Southeast Asia are intertwined. In the region, there are Hindu and Buddhist temples that are more than a thousand years old.

Singapore was founded in 1819 when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, an officer of the East India Company set foot on the island with a 1000 Sepoys and started a trading post. He brought with him a Indian called Narayana Pillai who set up a brick factory and became Singapore's first building contractor and real estate developer.  For about 50 years until 1867, Singapore was ruled from Calcutta.

When our medical school took in its first batch of local students about a 100 years ago in 1905, it was natural that some of the first students were from the Indian Diaspora.  These doctors then manned the local medical services, although the most senior positions were reserved for White Britishers. After World war two, when Asians were allowed to hold senior posts in the medical service, many members of the Diaspora went on to head medical departments, hospitals, the medical school and the University.

In fact when I was a student, my Professor of surgery was a graduate of Osmenia University, a well known University in Andrah Pradesh. However, about 40 years ago, the development pathways of the medical profession in India and Singapore diverged because the Indian medical council de-linked from the General Medical Council in London while Singapore continued to maintain that link with the GMC. So for many years, the Singapore and Indian medical profession drifted apart when the mutual recognition of degrees ended.

In April 2003, I went to New Delhi as part of the delegation of the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr. Goh Chok Tong.  We had talks with Mr. Vajpayee and both leaders agreed that Singapore and India should start negotiations on a free trade agreement. The negotiations took two years in part because of the change in government in India. Last year in June, our current Prime Minister Mr. Lee Hsien Loong and the Indian Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh signed the free trade agreement which has been termed CECA or Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement. CECA will liberalize the service sector including medical services.

India is Singapore's fastest growing partner among major economies. In 2003, bilateral trade was slightly less than US$5 billion. In 2004, it was more than US$ 7 billion. India is the second largest source of tourists to Singapore. India is an important source of new citizens for Singapore.

In January 2004, I attended the 2nd Pravasi in New Dehli. I took the opportunity to visit several other Indian cities, namely Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkotta. I visited two medical colleges, five private hospitals, two specialist centres, two government hospitals, two biotech parks and a technology park. That visit provided me with a snap-shot of the scale and potential of the Indian healthcare sector and its manpower capabilities. It was clearly apparent that there were many areas that Singapore and India could collaborate.  Over the last 2 years, several collaborations have successfully emerged.

In 2004, I visited the Max healthcare group. They were developing a new hospital and a chain of primary health care clinics in New Delhi. Following the visit, the Max healthcare group signed a training agreement with the Singapore General Hospital under which healthcare administrators and staff who will operate the hospital would be trained at the Singapore general hospital. So next time I visit a Max healthcare system facility in India, I know I will receive the same standard and quality of care that I can get at the Singapore General Hospital.

In Kolkata, Singapore's largest private healthcare group, Parkway Holdings, has built a modern hospital - the Apollo Gleneagles hospital. Parkway is a publicly listed company in Singapore and is Southeast Asia's largest private healthcare group with hospitals in multiple Asian counties.

Several years ago, a member of the Indian Diaspora, Mr Anil Thadani, became the chairman of the company.  Incidentally, he also invested into the Apollo group in India. And so, synergistic collaboration between the two groups was facilitated. They became partners in developing the modern hospital in Kolkatta which opened in 2004.  I visit the hospital shortly after it opened. It was full, with some patients even coming from Bangla Desh. The hospital was providing excellent high quality care in the state of Bengal.  Many patients who previously traveled to Chennai, Bangkok, USA or Singapore for treatment were now being treated at this hospital. With this success, Parkway has embarked on new projects.  Parkway has a joint venture project involving the setting up of a cyclotron and Pet-Scan in Hyderabad as well as developing an Asian Heart centre in Mumbai.

Indian doctors, nurses and other allied healthworkers are highly sought after in English speaking countries. This is especially so in a country like Singapore that shares the same British medical heritage. We have 200 Indian Nationals from 50 different medical schools registered as doctors in Singapore. Since 1995, our hospitals have been recruiting nurses from India. There are now more than 800 Indian trained nurses registered with the Singapore Nursing Board. They mostly come from the southern states like Andrha Pradesh, Karnataka,Kerala. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu,

The quality and capabilities of Indian healthcare workers is well known. We are now involved in an exciting area of collaboration with India - teleradiology. My Ministry has just certified a teleradiology project with Bangalore after doing an evaluation of the service standards. From this month, digital X-rays of patients in Singapore are being sent to Bangalore as part of a pilot to outsource radiology and have Xrays read and reported by radiologists in India. I am optimistic that this is the start of the outsourcing of medical services from Singapore to India. Our patients in Singapore will enjoy enormous savings in terms of health care costs.

Going forward, the Singapore Medical council is currently negotiating the terms of a Mutual recognition agreement of medical degrees with India. We hope to complete and sign the agreement by July this year.  I hope that by the middle of this year India will recognize the medical degree from the University of Singapore and we will start a progressive process of recognizing Indian Medical degrees or certificates, starting with the degrees of well established colleges.

The strong commitment by the political leaders of both India and Singapore towards building closer economic ties, augurs well for the healthcare industry. Together we can enjoy the competitive advantages of the free trade in services thereby providing more efficient healthcare services to our citizens.

Thank you.