Cancer Treatment in the Community! – Wee Joo Chng
Cancer Treatment in the Community!
It is important to emphasize that so much progress has been made in cancer treatment that more cancers can be cured, and many more can be controlled for a very long time. At the same time, treatments are also easier to administer and associated with less side effects.
Consistent with HealthierSG and the Ministry of Health’s initiative to shift healthcare from hospital to home/community, National University Cancer Institute, Singapore, pioneered a program to deliver some oncology treatment and care, in the home and community setting. It has proven to be so successful, and benefitting so many patients that we are now expanding to more sites and more types of treatment and services.
We will continue to deliver initiatives and care models that will benefit our patients. Increasingly, I foresee more ‘patient-centered decentralized healthcare’. Developing effective models to facilitate this and also technologies to enable this will be key. Old models (typical in Singapore) where disease management is mainly specialist- and hospital-based, will gradually diminished. I think this is also helpful in blunting the rise in healthcare cost.