MINISTRY OF HEALTH

The Ministry's aim is a healthy and physically fit nation. It will emphasize activities to promote health, prevent diseases and educate the public to stay healthy. The Ministry will devote greater attention to the prevention, early diagnosis and treatment of the major prevailing diseases like cancer, heart disease and strokes. It will upgrade hospital and primary health care services and provide more specialized services. Better and more sophisticated health services will inevitably increase costs. Singaporeans must be prepared to pay their fair share of the higher costs of specialized health care they seek.

Preventive medicine is the most effective way of ensuring that Singaporeans remain healthy. The Ministry has extended its comprehensive immunization programme to groups which are susceptible to measles and rubella. It will introduce Hepatitis B immunization to the population in stages. We shall further develop maternal and child health services to ensure a good start for future generations. We shall sustain health screening for school children and expectant mothers and expand the school dental health services.

The Ministry will continue to provide effective and easily accessible outpatient services to children, the elderly and the poor. It will improve services at the out-patient clinics. The working population will have the choice of seeking outpatient care from the public or private sector.

The Ministry will promote community based health care services to serve the health care needs of an ageing population. It will transfer the care of the aged sick from costly hospitals to the home and community hospitals. The Ministry shall expand the Home Nursing Foundation's activities to cover a wider range of medi- cal, rehabilitative and nursing services for the aged population.

The Ministry will improve the quality of hospitals and their supporting facilities. The new 750-bedded hospital at Kent Ridge, when fully completed in 1986, will be a modern teaching and research hospital. The older government hospitals will be redeveloped to offer a higher standard of medical care and accommodation. The Ministry will build a modern pharmaceutical factory to meet its own and the country's needs.

The Ministry will restructure and modernize the administration of its hospitals to make them more efficient. A large scale computerized Hospital Information System for patient management, hospital administration and planning is currently being installed. We will train more hospital administrators overseas to strengthen hospital management and to allow government hospitals greater autonomy.

The Ministry aims to develop Singapore into a regional medical centre of excellence. We shall recruit and train more medical specialists in different disciplines and supporting paramedical personnel. We shall establish new subspecialities in selected fields of medicine and surgery. We will further raise the standard of the existing specialities of Neurosurgery, Cardiothoracic Surgery, Paediatric and Plastic Surgery and Renal Medicine.

We shall forge closer association and exchange programmes with internationally renowned medical centres in the United States, Europe and Australia. This will enable our doctors to acquire more advanced medical skills and techniques from their foreign counterparts.

The Ministry will extend the Medisave Scheme to payment of the full Class A government hospital bill. It will extend the Scheme to private hospitals at a later date. The self-employed, who constitute about 13% of the total labour force, will be brought into the Scheme. This will ensure that Singaporeans will have the means to meet the cost of hospitalization in later years when they need it most.

DR TONY TAN KENG YAM Minister for Health