By Tamsin Greulich-Smith, Chief, Smart Health Leadership Centre, NUS-ISS
Singapore is widely recognised as having one of the best healthcare systems in the world. The Bloomberg 2018 Health Care Efficiency Index ranks Singapore second globally, based on the cost of healthcare in relation to average lifespan, while the World Health Organisation ranks Singapore as sixth in the world based on a wide range of performance metrics. We can proudly boast state-of-the-art hospitals, highly specialised clinicians, and a national drive towards integrated care. Yet, in common with developed nations around the world, our healthcare system is grappling with growing and complex demands that are making it ever harder to maintain such high standards.
Partly as a result of our excellent healthcare services, Singaporeans are living longer than ever. As we live longer, so our consumption of healthcare increases. Data suggests that our demands on healthcare services grow exponentially after the age of 50, with patients over 85 years old requiring on average three times as much healthcare support as 65 year olds. For many people, as they age they will also become increasingly susceptible to chronic illnesses. This results in patients requiring far more complex treatments and healthcare journeys than our healthcare systems were originally designed for.
Evolution of Healthcare
Thankfully healthcare technology is evolving at such pace that we are able to offset some of these burdens through greater efficiency and effectiveness. Artificial Intelligence, Electronic Medical Records, personal monitoring devices and more are coming together to help us pre-empt, prevent, or more speedily address health problems. The impacts digital technology and data are creating on healthcare delivery and health outcomes are already staggering, and constantly expanding.
Unfortunately, the pace of technological change can often feel baffling and overwhelming. Particularly in Asia, where markets are seeing the most rapid growth in digital health. The opportunities clinicians and nurses identify on the ground are not always easily explained to the non-clinical digital or IT teams, often resulting in solutions that don’t meet expectations and are not well adopted. Data is available in reams, to better inform decision making, yet it is not always collected, stored, or retrieved in ways that can readily be used by practitioners. The British Medical Association and the American Medical Association have both called for changes to medical school curriculums, in order to better prepare tomorrow’s clinicians for a digital healthcare environment, while the European Health Parliament found that more than 80% of healthcare practitioners feel they are inadequately prepared for today’s digital healthcare practices, let alone future trends.
As healthcare systems try to adapt and change to meet their growing challenges, transformation can feel impossible when the daily delivery tasks are so demanding, and the multitude of solutions so confounding.
Singapore's first Professional Diploma in Smart Health Leadership
It is in response to these urgent and real industry needs that NUS-ISS launched Singapore’s first Professional Diploma in Smart Health Leadership. Based on insights gained from working with healthcare and social care professionals to tackle delivery challenges in the field, the NUS-ISS Smart Health Leadership Centre designed a programme specifically for practitioners seeking to transform the future of health.
The Professional Diploma is an experiential and intensive training and research programme, that uses a 360 degree leadership ethos to build tomorrow’s healthcare transformation teams.
The programme is deliberately designed to be accessible to a wide range of healthcare or social care practitioners, from clinical or non-clinical roles. Transformation efforts benefit from a broad range of staff understanding how they can contribute to, and be empowered to play their role in, the transformation agenda. Hence the Professional Diploma encourages participation from diverse practitioners, teaching them key methodologies and tools to support transformation design and implementation, fuelled by multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Training comprises five short executive education courses, guiding participants in using human-centred design to frame challenges and ideate impactful solutions; understanding the role of data in designing and articulating transformation efforts; creating digital technology roadmaps to support transformation goals; designing new and integrated business processes; and applying systems thinking techniques to determine the correct decision making tools in complex adaptive systems.
On completion of the training component of the Professional Diploma, participants must apply the techniques they’ve been taught during the delivery of a capstone research project. The capstone project requires 3-6 month part-time effort from participants, and includes implementation of a pilot in an industry setting.
Previous students have implemented projects such as workflow redesign and patient engagement in an Emergency Department, which resulted in substantial improvements to patient waiting times and satisfaction levels. Another project sought to automate hospital alert processes in order to ensure the right doctor is directed to the right patient at the right time, every time. In addition to the tangible outcomes measured during the pilots, organisations have also reported a positive change in the attitude towards change and innovation in the workplace, with learning impacts cascading more widely through the organisation as a result of stakeholder engagement and co-creation activities.
Transformation is a journey, often with a clear kick-off but rarely with a defined end point. Developing tomorrow’s leaders to transform the future of health will also be an ongoing journey. Whilst there may not be a final destination, healthcare’s future transformation leaders might well start with the NUS-ISS Professional Diploma in Smart Health Leadership: designed to build the skills, mindsets, and appetites for driving the future experience of health.
Click here to find out more on Smart Health Leadership Centre and the programmes we offer.