SPEECH BY MR ONG YE KUNG, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND COORDINATING MINISTER FOR SOCIAL POLICIES, AT THE 2026 NURSES’ MERIT AWARD

Ms Paulin Koh, Chief Nursing Officer

Chief Nurses, Nurses

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

1.             It is my pleasure to join you at this year’s Nurses’ Merit Award (NMA).

2.             We are here to honour nurses who have shown unwavering dedication, skill and heart in caring for patients. I am sure the recipients today also know, and are highly cognisant that the awards are not just as a recognition of their individual contributions, but also a tribute to the ethics and professionalism of our entire nursing workforce.

3.             I thought this is the nursing season because Nurses’ Day is also coming. Rather than reporting on what we have done in your programme, you know all this stuff, I thought I would tell more stories this year.

4.             Let me share a story. I tend to attend the wakes of my residents. It is also an occasion where I ask them, especially the seniors who tend to have illnesses, about their hospital experience, the nurses and the doctors, and so on. And I get a lot of feedback from attending wakes.

5.             So I attended this one, a few months ago, that left a strong impression. This is a senior gentleman in my constituency. I sat down. I think the wife was there with two doctors, I started chit chatting with them.  They said the father had been very sick, and at the advanced age, it is the usual – he had multiple conditions, was very sick and in one of our regional hospitals, and already put on palliative care. But the father was still lucid and able to speak, and said that he wanted to go home to pass away. But because he was so sick, and you know, transporting an end-of-life patient home carries significant risks and so the hospital was a bit hesitant. In the end, the family told the father, “Why not just pass away in a hospital?” The father’s condition turned for the worse, but the father continued to insist that he wanted to go home. At that point, the whole family started tearing up and bursting into tears.

6.             So I was bracing myself the whole way. I will listen. What was I expecting? I expected, “why did the hospital not fulfil my father’s wish?” You know, I expected that. I expected them to say, some families do say, “why did the hospital prolong the lives of my loved ones, and why do they put them into palliative care?” I still get those complaints quite a bit, sometimes very emotional. Some of them complained about their bills, complained about services, and so on.

7.             So I was bracing myself for all that, but instead, they said “no”. Despite the risk that the father was in a bad state, the hospital sprang into action, prepared the ambulance, the nurses prepared the patient, took all the precautions because risk is involved, and sent them all home. The father entered the house, and moments later, he passed away peacefully.

8.             And then they told me, “We are common Singaporeans who live in an HDB estate. We are nobodies but yet the hospital did that for us.” That is why they cried. There were tears of gratitude, of being touched by the kindness and the dedication of our care team. That was why they burst into tears.

9.             But such stories are actually not uncommon in our hospitals. You have probably all encountered them. As patients get older, more are undergoing palliative care in hospices, nursing homes and also hospitals. And some may stabilise enough to make it home. For others who cannot, we still endeavour to make their final journeys as comforting and as comfortable as possible.

10.         And this is one example of the evolving roles of healthcare and nursing, as Singapore ages. Nurses are at the centre of this evolution, helping shape what the system will become. And increasingly, nurses will need to act earlier, closer to home, with great confidence and autonomy, and most importantly, with kindness and empathy.

11.         Which is why today, the entire system, I feel, is springing into action to impart new skills and prepare nurses for your future new evolved roles.  Last year, I spoke about some areas where nursing roles must evolve. I talked about community nursing, palliative care and long-term care. But the change really goes beyond that, to almost every aspect of healthcare.

12.         For example, as we expand the network of Active Ageing Centres and incorporate Community Health Posts (CHPs) into the centres, nurses are undergoing training and on-the-job practice to proactively strengthen the health of seniors living in the community.

13.         And in CHPs, you are starting to coordinate care, you provide appropriate nursing interventions such as frailty, vision, and hearing screenings, you ensure medication compliance, and you nudge seniors to adopt healthy habits.

14.         In Toa Payoh, which is an Age Well Neighbourhood, CHPs have begun offering nurse telehealth. And this is a practical innovation with a very human purpose, which can save an elderly resident a very exhausting trip to the clinic just to ask a nurse whether a new symptom is cause for concern. And we can now to do it through telehealth by seeing a nurse through technology. For a caregiver, it means knowing a qualified person is checking in regularly on their loved ones.

15.         Our public healthcare clusters have begun training nurses in generalist palliative care, so that more nurses can better support patients and families in the community as the patient approaches end-of-life.

16.         I set a target. At first when I set it, I thought just set something outrageous – train 10,000 nurses and healthcare workers in palliative care by 2030. During my recent visit to the National University Hospital (NUH), I found out that the hospital alone is targeting to train 3,100 nurses in generalist palliative care within the timeframe I specified, and that is just one hospital. Some institutions have set up in-house training programmes to equip their nurses with generalist skills as well. Several public healthcare institutions (PHIs) are helping to train nurses in nursing homes in end-of-life care, Advance Care Planning and Preferred Plan of Care. The upskilling movement is far larger than I envisaged and I am very certain, whatever outrageous target I set, it will be surpassed because NUH alone is training one-third of that.

17.         Our Institutes of Higher Learning are also stepping forward to support us. They have been redesigning existing post-diploma specialty programmes into work-study formats for our nurses, prioritising areas where needs are growing. This would allow nurses to deepen your skills while staying close to practice.

18.         In long-term care, efforts are underway to raise competency levels and professional standards of nurses, so that you can better attend to the clinical, functional, psychological, and social needs of residents.

19.         The Nursing Home-Nursing Professional Development Workgroup, which was set up in January this year, will bring together nurse leaders from nursing homes, community and acute care hospitals to lead the skills transformation effort in the long-term care sector.

20.         In addition, the Institute of Mental Health has helped train United Medicare and Vanguard Healthcare staff in managing the needs of residents with psychiatric conditions. 

21.         These are some examples of the many, many efforts that are happening on the ground, in the community, and in our PHIs, to equip our nurses with new skills, so that you will be at the centre and the engine of transformation of healthcare. The transformation is already underway, and I hope we keep up the momentum, to train, develop, grow and evolve the role of nurses. It is critical for us to do so, because the future of healthcare in Singapore will be shaped by the future of nursing in Singapore.

22.         The success of this transformation journey will ultimately rest not just on policies or programmes or training courses, but more so on people – on nurses who are prepared to take on new roles, build new capabilities, learn new skills, and lead change on the ground.

23.         And more importantly, it depends on the ethics and heart of our nurses, to show kindness and compassion to all patients, to ensure that every patient is important, to ensure that that nobody is a nobody, and everybody is a somebody. You are a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a friend, and most importantly, you are a patient that we care for.

24.         To our award recipients, your excellence and dedication set the standard for the profession and inspire all of us. Congratulations once again, and thank you for everything that you are doing. Thank you.