Public Hospitals with Dedicated Role Similar to Patient Care Officer

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Health (a) how many public hospitals have a dedicated role similar to the Patient Care Officer (PCO) position at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital; and (b) whether there are plans to encourage hospitals to have more roles similar to the PCO position.

The Senior Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health (Ms Rahayu Mahzam) (for the Minister for Health): Mr Speaker, all public hospitals already employ staff who undertake roles similar to Patient Care Officers at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. They may just have different job titles, such as Care Support Associates or Patient Service Associates.

Mr Speaker: Mr Ng.

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang: Sir, can I just ask the Senior Parliamentary Secretary two quick clarifications? One, I know we are increasing the number of nurses. Could I also ask whether we are equally putting in an amount of effort in increasing the number of support healthcare staff as well? Second, I am very glad we have announced the Award for Nurses' Grace, Excellence and Loyalty (ANGEL) scheme for nurses. I am just wondering whether we could also extend that to the administrative and support healthcare workers that work alongside the nurses.

Ms Rahayu Mahzam: I appreciate the Member's concern about the nurses having to undertake many different roles. That is the whole point of creating these patient support roles, which are in the current hospitals. But there are practical limits to actually extending this, because there are issues with truncating job roles into just purely clinical or non-clinical roles. Neither is fully desirable. These patient support roles can be very unattractive and then you end up not actually attracting anyone.

So, every job has to bring satisfaction and purpose and we have to look at this holistically. Because of that, the Ministry of Health is already in discussions with the clusters to look at job redesign.

With regard to the ANGEL scheme, this is something that we can take into consideration and we can update Members in due course.