Speeches
SPEECH BY MINISTER FOR HEALTH MR ONG YE KUNG AT THE SILVER GENERATION OFFICE 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION, AT SUNTEC CITY SINGAPORE CONVENTION & EXHIBITION CENTRE, 11AM
12 October 2024
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Dr Gerard Ee, Chairman, Agency for Integrated Care (AIC),
Mr Dinesh Vasu Dash, Chief Executive Officer, AIC,
Silver Generation Ambassadors,
Advisers,
Silver Generation Office (SGO) colleagues and partners,
The Early Years
A very good morning to all of you.
SGO started as the Pioneer Generation Office (PGO), because there was the Pioneer Generation (PG) package. As Kiat How mentioned, PGO started off in a storeroom in Tampines. At that time, the headquarters of PGO was at Treasury Building. They were trying to recruit more ambassadors and staff, so they had many interviews. They went to Funan Shopping Mall, had many cups of coffee, tea and milo, and interviewed and recruited a lot of people. Through all that hard work, the team doubled to 100 pax by the end of 2014.
In 2018, PGO expanded and merged with AIC and became part of the Ministry of Health (MOH), and was renamed the Silver Generation Office. In that process, the work also expanded. Beyond the Pioneer Generation, it also covered the younger seniors and rolled out the Merdeka Generation Package.
Recognition of SGAs
Our Silver Generation Ambassadors (SGAs) are the backbone of SGO, and their role involves a lot of hard work, going door to door. We planted seeds and laid the foundation, and today SGO has become a very big and powerful force and asset that we have on the ground.
In the past, your work was a bit different. Your engagements were mostly through pen and paper. You had to bring stacks of engagement forms, brochures, and a file with lots of information to share details about the Pioneer Generation Package with seniors. Then you started showing a video of then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong talking to seniors about the PG package. I was told some seniors waved back at him.
Today, some things have improved, but by and large some things have not changed. The work is still the same. You are still walking door-to-door, walking up and down stairs, knocking on every door, and engaging seniors. That has not changed, it should not change, and will not change. Because that is fundamentally what you do – connecting people to people.
Over the years, by doing so, you have helped to communicate and explain many national schemes and initiatives to our seniors. The seniors actually read a lot more newspapers and watch a lot more TV than young people. And yet, they really enjoy and appreciate it when you explain the policies to them, when there is face-to-face communication and the policy comes to life. You have helped countless seniors to benefit from the support that is available.
Today we are recognising many SGAs for your hard work. Over 200 awards will be given out. We will be giving out 17 Exemplary Awards, 61 Platinum Awards, and 10 Family Awards on stage. The rest of the awards will be distributed off-stage. All in all, many thanks to 10 years of hard work! Thank you very much.
Update on Age Well SG
As SGO became part of AIC, the scope of your work expanded to all seniors aged 60 and above. Beyond the PG package, we then had me the Merdeka Generation (MG) Package and Majulah Package. Through the process, the nation, government and people started to have a focus on seniors. This is a group that is growing, and we need to take care of them. If we take care of them well, they are not a challenge, but an asset.
Seniors can be young, healthy and active. I meet so many people who are in their 60s and 70s, who behave like they are so young. It is an inspiration. With proper policies and engagement, whether you are young or old, it is in the mind. Let’s not be bogged down in saying that we are always going to be an ageing society. We cannot stop ageing by age, but we can reverse ageing in spirit. Because of that, we have started to think of different policies that help the seniors.
Healthier SG was conceived. Without PG, maybe there would not have been an inspiration to start Healthier SG. Without SGO, PG package and SGAs, I don’t think we would have thought of Age Well SG, which has everything to do with seniors. We need to connect the Active Ageing Centres’ (AAC) work together with the SGAs. SGAs have become an indispensable, important capability to support all our senior-related programmes, such as Age Well SG and Healthier SG.
We have set up over 200 AACs. As I always say, it is not difficult to fill the four walls of an AAC with activities and regular visitors. But to be truly successful, it has to go beyond that. There has to be proper outreach to seniors living around the area, within your service boundary, and with many levels of engagement with all the seniors. Then you are successful. You can only achieve that if you knock enough doors. In fact, you have to knock on doors every day. Otherwise, you have no chance to succeed. The roles of SGAs and AACs are now symbiotic. One cannot do without the other.
Today, let me report on the progress of Age Well SG. It has been one year since we rolled out this major programme with your help. We added 60 more AACs over the past one year. We now have 214 AACs, and our target is 220 by 2025.
AACs have expanded activities and programmes well beyond the confines of their centres. It is now common to see AAC events held in public spaces, such as parks, coffee shops, void decks, sports centres and Residents’ Network (RN) centres. Activities are now much more broad ranging, way beyond Rummy-O. There are now carpentry work, community cooking and dining, all kinds of fitness programmes, gym tonic, excursions and learning classes. All these are now available at AACs, and there is a lot of innovation coming up on the ground.
Engagement has greatly improved. I think our SGAs have really helped. In FY2021, each AAC engaged on average 17 seniors a day. In FY2023, this has gone up to 42, which is almost triple. This is also reflected in the activity participation numbers. In FY2021, the number of seniors who participated in AAC activities was 17,000. In FY2023, it was 80,000. We have multiplied our engagement by at least four times.
We launched the Silver Guardian programme in April this year, also inspired by SGAs, to encourage more senior volunteerism in the AACs. We have now recruited, trained and deployed 800 volunteers, and are on track to reach our target of 2,400 Silver Guardians by 2028.
As Mr Gerard Ee mentioned, we can do even better by having RN ambassadors. We have 6,000 SGAs. We can have a lot more senior volunteers all over Singapore, not necessarily SGAs. I think we can do much better than 6,000 SGA volunteers. We can multiply it by 100 times. We will have one million seniors by 2030. It is not unthinkable that out of one million seniors, 60% of them do some form of volunteer work, such as micro jobs, SGAs, or RN ambassadors and volunteers with social organisations. It is possible.
New Initiatives
We will further strengthen Age Well SG, with the help of SGAs. We are working on three new initiatives.
First, we will continue to upgrade existing AACs. We announced earlier that we would set aside $800 million over five years (FY2024 to 2028) to support AACs for their programmes. To support their work further, we will now enhance this by $140 million, to upgrade the facilities of existing AACs.
Second, we will strengthen outreach to seniors. This is the starting point of all our effective engagement with seniors and a successful senior engagement strategy. Today, one-third of our AACs manage to reach out to 30% of seniors. We see that as an effective engagement rate. This is a vast improvement from the previous year, but there is still much more room for improvement.
We need to further expand outreach where we can, partly from SGAs, but more importantly, to bring in new volunteer groups. For example, the People’s Association volunteer groups and community Grassroots Leaders are important resources for us to tap on, and also corporate volunteers. More corporates want to volunteer, and they will get their staff to work in the community. If you engage them well, they are extremely reliable.
SGAs, AACs and community volunteers will become tripartite partners on the ground, working closely together with each other, knocking on every door to engage seniors and attract them to AACs. Our hospital clusters will support health services in the AACs as well. With these three partners and outreach on the ground, I think we can have a successful strategy. MOH is working on the processes to facilitate this community tripartite partnership.
On the ground, when we try to work with each other, we always say we cannot share information due to the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA). This is actually not true. When you dig deep enough, it is possible to have a collaborative working relationship. We have worked out the processes and will roll that out, starting with Sembawang. I think it will work. Once it is successful, and no doubt it will, it will be at a community near you.
Third, we will improve the home care system. This includes the Enhanced Home Personal Care service which provides more tailored support to seniors, even those with higher care needs. Essentially, we have home care staff closer to the client’s home, who will be able to respond faster. This model has shown promising results and MOH is planning to mainstream this service island-wide by end of next year.
As the range of services and number of providers grow, we need to better coordinate care. AIC has taken the lead to work with providers to deliver coordinated care with a single contact point, care assessment and care plan for seniors. It is not an easy task, as we have many providers on the ground in certain constituencies and divisions. AIC will do their best to coordinate care. Our vision is to have one contact point, one assessment and one care plan for every senior, even though we have many service providers.
Our community partners are supportive. We are working towards implementing this across Singapore by 2026. By end of this year, we will start to seek out interested players to operate in a few locations that are currently green fields and have no providers. They can start off with very coordinated services on the ground. For other areas with incumbent providers, they will work out arrangements to come together as a coordinated unit to realise this vision and ambition. I understand there is a lot of work ahead, but it is a meaningful undertaking to serve our seniors better.
The Meaning of Volunteerism
Every one of you became an SGA because of the spirit of volunteerism. What is the benefit of volunteerism? I think there are at least three. One, to help others. I am the Chairman of the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC). Sometimes, young people come to us to say that they want to volunteer, and they have plans. They want to do a seminar, fundraising or help the environment. It is good for young people to have that sense to want to contribute to society. But I always tell them to start by helping one person. In CDAC, there is a programme where if you are a young volunteer, you can mentor a child of a challenging, vulnerable background. So to help others is one major motivation to volunteer.
The second is to help yourself. There are also many young people who come to my Meet-the-People sessions to do volunteer work. Many of them tell me that before they came, they thought they had a lot of problems. After seeing all the difficult cases, their problems are not big at all. In this generation where there is a lot more challenging mental health issues, for many people, helping others is to help yourself.
Finally, I will say volunteerism makes you young and healthy. I have seen it with my own eyes. Volunteers are often very young-spirited and enthusiastic. There is a lot of research and literature that show that if you keep yourself busy even after retiring, just by volunteering in the community, you feel that you are still contributing to society as a useful person. That is the most important driver of good health, so keep that going. We would rather a senior be a volunteer and become part of the solution today, than not volunteer or exercise, become sick and a problem tomorrow. Be a solution today, rather than a problem tomorrow.
We talked about planting seeds, starting off with the PG package and a small group of volunteers who were PG ambassadors. Those were the seeds for a much larger strategy and national effort to keep our seniors healthy. Keep on planting seeds, growing the trees and working. We will support you where we can. We assure you that you are making a huge difference to Singapore and our seniors. Thank you.