SPEECH BY MR ONG YE KUNG, MINISTER FOR HEALTH, AT THE MOH HOLDINGS AND SMRT CORPORATION MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING SIGNING CEREMONY, 31 AUGUST 2024, 9.00AM AT BAYFRONT MRT STATION

Mr Seah Moon Ming, Chairman, SMRT Corporation

Mr Ngien Hoon Ping, Group Chief Executive Officer, SMRT Corporation 

Ms Lai Wei Lin, Chairperson, MOH Holdings

Mr Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer, MOH Holdings

1. I understand the media have came in full force today thinking I will speak about mpox. I was not planning to. There will be a press conference next week where we give you our full response, so please be patient.

2. I have a long association with SMRT. I used to be on the board. In those days, SMRT had problems with reliability but much has improved. And I must say, over the years, we see a lot of innovation in the company. The idea of advertising at bus stops and trains started long ago, and it brings you extra revenue, so that is an innovation.

3. But when Mr Seah Moon Ming came in as Chairman, he brought with him his own technology and very meaningful management method of Kaizen. Kaizen has grown out of fashion since the 1980s, when Japan was competing with the US. Sony televisions and walkmans, and Toyota Cars were all working very well because of Kaizen. That means every worker can pull a string and stop the assembly line in order to make improvements. These are ground-up innovations. Today, few people talk about it. I am a strong believer of continuous improvement in Kaizen, and I am very glad that SMRT is still doing this, which saves around $100 million every year. I am very glad that the third and best innovation is to plow it back to our nurses. We have about 46,000 nurses, including the private sector nurses. Thank you very much for thinking about all nurses.

4. After SMRT, I went to NTUC, and was the leader of your union. The five-day week became a six-day week, but with pay increase. We worked out something that worked for everybody. Then I entered politics, and ended up in the Ministry of Transport. So my association with transport has been long. I have always found transport to be fascinating, because behind the scenes, there is so much hard, physical engineering work going on, but fronting the public and the community is a very soft image. You bring people from point to point, connecting people, giving back to society. So thank you very much, SMRT.

5. I must say that I see the same spirit in the Ministry of Health (MOH). Behind MOH are some very hard sciences – studying virus pathogens and coming up with treatments. This is difficult, hard scientific work, but again, fronting the public, we do things with heart, with passion, with care. So I see the same spirit, and also lots of innovation within MOH. There is so much innovation in MOH we can talk about but I will just talk about one today, which is about recruitment.

6. As our population gets older, capacity has to increase. Capacity is useless if you do not have doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals. So we constantly have to recruit. The truth is, healthcare is a very attractive sector. Amongst our students, we are taking 7% to 8% of every cohort into healthcare. I think no sector can dream of that kind of number but we are taking in that number. Still, it is not enough. So we need to recruit also from overseas to complement our local core.

7. What I think we can do more is that every year, we have places for healthcare in our ITE, polytechnics and university. They are all full and oversubscribed. However, there is actually a percentage, not a small one, that after graduation did not come into healthcare. There is nothing wrong with that, because healthcare training is very good, just like engineers. After your training, you can go into any sector. You can become a journalist or a ministry administrator. You can do a lot of things, because you have received very good training. But we hope that some of those who did not come into healthcare, even though they were trained in healthcare, can join our healthcare sector, and give it a try.

8. With our collaboration, we can try our best to reach out to those with healthcare qualifications but who did not come into the sector, to try something that is novel and important for Singapore, something that will impact others.

9. I am very happy to witness the MOU today, and to meet up with a lot of old friends and current colleagues. Thank you very much.