REMARKS BY MR ONG YE KUNG, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND COORDINATING MINISTER FOR SOCIAL POLICIES, AT THE OPENING OF WOODLANDS HOSPICE, 3 AUGUST 2026

             Thank you. Let me first clarify – our target is to train 10,000 nurses and healthcare workers. So NUHS already pledged 3,000, and today Woodlands Hospital pledged 1,000, that’s just two hospitals, so I think all NHG hospitals should just follow up.

2             I have a lot of people to greet first. First, Ms Jennie Chua, who used to chair the development of Woodlands Hospital, and today still chairs the Woodlands Health Fund. Then we got Mr Lim Hang Chung, Emeritus Chairman of Cheng Hong Welfare Service Society. We’ve got Dr Chuan Thian Poh, Honorary Chairman of Ren Ci Hospital. I think we should give one of these titles to Ms Jennie Chua, “Emeritus Chairman of Woodlands Health”. Mr Neo Kah Kiat, Lifetime Honorary Chairman of Cheng Hong Welfare Association. Mr Seow Choke Meng, Chairman of Ren Ci Hospital. And to all friends, ladies and gentlemen.

3             There's a story to share because I know my good friends Kenny (Sim) and (Neo) Sing Hwee well, so from time to time they will invite me to the Cheng Hong fundraising. The Cheng Hong fundraising is very effective thanks to Mr Neo Kah Kiat. It's one of the most effective, you know, and very inclusive. Many people step forward to help, so I always try to support. I attended two years as your Guest-of-Honour, and there was one year, particularly we thought let's write four words with the word “吉” inside. It's important to write “吉”. So we put “吉祥安康”,  because “康 ” is in my name and “吉” is in Neo Kah Kiat’s name. So he will feel very obliged to bid for it, and he did. That year we raised quite a bit of funds, and that's when Cheng Hong raised with me, with all these funds, what can we do? And they specifically said, can we do something for healthcare? That's when I suggested let's do something for hospice, for palliative care. And I said, why not do it in the North, and then we have Ren Ci.  Then they said we need to get to know Seow Choke Meng – I said Seow Choke Meng is a childhood friend, no problem. So that's why we are all together, to cut the long story short, we all got together and finally realised it. We started with a calligraphy, but really the hard work was what followed. So, I want to thank everyone that worked very hard all these months and the past year to bring this to this stage.

4             First, to thank Woodlands Hospital for developing this wonderful facility in the North to take care of the population in the North and incorporating Ren Ci as your community partner and now developing this facility. And I want to then thank Ren Ci Hospital for having the vision from a very early stage to want to be an end-of-life palliative care provider, and now finding a home and a partner in a public healthcare institution to do this. And I know you've been working on this for some time, Seow Choke Meng, he thanked me for giving them this opportunity, but actually you created this opportunity all these years, so thank you very much.

5             I want to thank Cheng Hong Welfare Service Society for stepping forward for this very important cause, you are contributing $6 million over six years. This means a lot to our operations, and also beyond that, you have a significant volunteer base, and I think we'll be mobilising them to also help out with providing and delivering hospice care to patients, and together we provide inpatient palliative care, therapeutic services. We all talked about it, including music, art therapy, horticulture, outdoor activities – in the North there’s quite a bit of outdoor activities you can engage in. Befriending, caregiver support, community outreach, bereavement support as well, and there are also community partners in the North, which you are aware of, that will provide necessary community support.

6             This is indeed a very significant development in the North, because we have end-of-life providers – Assisi, Dover Park Hospice, HCA, that's been active throughout the island, but in the North we never had a dedicated provider, and I really strongly welcome the collaboration between all three institutions to develop a provider for the North.

7             As our population ages, if I take a step back, as a society, we will increasingly face difficult decisions regarding end-of-life care, and these are deeply emotional issues and situations. And healthcare institutions, we will have to support patients and families in these periods with compassion, sensitivity, and also professionalism. So the system, I will say, over the years, has been learning how to cope with this much better, and hence we are proactively developing the palliative care sector.

8             Many, many things have been done. We stepped up the financial support for palliative care, and because of that, we could expand the capacity. We talk about training more nurses in general palliative care, so that everyone has some basic understanding of palliative care and how to communicate, how to care for patients in palliative care. We are working with more partners, developing new partnership capabilities. All public health hospitals now have a compassionate discharge procedure, which has to be sensitively carried out, and we are still learning. There's probably a lot more for us to learn, but the demand and the need for this is there, and we need to catch up with the need that society needs, and that is the commitment of public health institutions and the whole public healthcare system.

9             And I would say, Singaporeans and the society also need to learn to cope with this; need to learn to cope with end-of-life, and all the emotions that comes with it. I would say that we've come a long way when it comes to cancer and end-stage cancer, advanced stage cancer, there's a lot more acceptance. I sense it amongst patients that come to Meet-the-People Sessions (MPS) to see me. I sense it amongst my relatives, even my own loved ones, my own family, my friends. There's just a lot more acceptance that cancer at the advanced stage is terminal, is end-of-life. Compassionate care, end-of-life palliative care is actually the most simple, compassionate, and the right thing to do, and it accords dignity to the patient. And a lot of people understand that, and I'm quite comforted by that.

10           But I would say, when it comes to end-of-life patients that is due to heart attack or stroke, which can be just as life threatening, is also end-of-life - when it's very severe, there's much less understanding and acceptance, and I think we still need some time to work on it. So, as a Member of Parliament (MP) also in the North, from time to time I do get patients and their families coming to visit me, and I start to notice this is a pattern when it comes to end-of-life due to heart attack and stroke, understanding is much less. They will come to me not in anger, mostly in grief and anguish. They will say why is it like that? My grandparents, my parents look okay, all these years okay. Then feel uncomfortable, came to the hospital, and suddenly at night, heart attack or stroke, and then now they are gone or they passed on. Or the hospital tells me, why not consider palliative care. They find it very sudden and unable to accept. And they also wonder sometimes, and they do ask me, did the doctor do something wrong? Did the hospital do something wrong? Have they done their best? Why so sudden? These are the questions in their minds, and I think we need to educate the public on this.

11           We need to reassure the public, and assure the public that healthcare workers will always act professionally and actively in the patient's best interests. Our responsibility is to ensure that care providers are always appropriate, compassionate, and beneficial to patients. We need to help patients and their families understand that the nature of heart attacks and strokes is that the problem has been there for many years. It's just that they accumulate slowly until the organ or the body fails. It may look sudden, but the problem has been underlying for a long time.

12           It is like a car inching towards a cliff. Every inch, every foot, you think okay, okay, until you tip over the cliff, and that's when disaster happens. But it's never sudden. Healthcare professionals will do their best to treat patients suffering from sudden heart attacks and stroke. But when it's very severe, there will come a point in time when the doctors have assessed that aggressive treatments no longer have the prospect of reversing a dismal prognosis, and it may, in fact, prolong the suffering of the patient. And that's when healthcare workers will inform the loved ones that perhaps the patient should receive end-of-life palliative care. So, for clinicians, the consideration for every patient they care for is the same: that they must always act in the best interest of their patient. And when a patient has an end-of-life condition, it matters not whether it is terminal cancer, or devastating stroke, or heart attack. They wish to ease suffering for the patient, and for the patient to live peacefully, in comfort, with minimum suffering, and importantly with dignity. And it is right and a merciful thing to do.

13           We still have capabilities to build in terms of communication. Healthcare professionals probably can do a lot better, but the heart is always in the right place. And what we do is clinically, ethically correct. We will have to go through this period of raising awareness. Just as palliative care has become much more accepted over the years, with time, I think Singaporeans will likewise be more aware of the terminal nature of some heart attacks and strokes, for that matter, other diseases as well, step by step, and that nurses and doctors will always do our best in the interest of the patient. I say we, actually I’m neither a doctor nor nurse. You always do your best. It's the effect of Nurses' Day.

14           I thank Woodlands Hospital, Ren Ci, Cheng Hong, once again for embarking on this noble cause. I hope to also continue to have your strong support, and also hope to have the support and understanding of residents of this facility and for end-of-life care to succeed in Singapore. Thank you.