Dear Partners and Friends,
Happy New Year to everyone!
This past year has been a challenging one, but also a fruitful one in finding new ways to care for our residents together. We hope that 2021 will bring new opportunities to collaborate as we slowly emerge from the COVID tranches.
Over the past years, partners in Central Health have been working together towards building Healthier, Happier Communities, where people are activated and supported to live well and age well in their homes and communities. Through various collaborative programs and initiatives with the TTSH Community Health Teams (CHT) and even through the COVID experience, we have forged stronger relationships with one another, even as we continue to look for new ways to care for our population together.
This sense of working together as a network of providers has been evident at the annual Central Health Action & Learning (CHALK) event. The inaugural event in 2018 brought together 96 participants from 16 organisations and in the recent CHALK 2020, we had 210 participants from 36 partner organisations coming together to co-share and co-learn. The number of common themes and interests have also almost doubled from four to seven over these 3 years. Examples include initiatives like building the Community of Care (CoC), Esther Network and Dementia Support Groups. More critically, this platform has given us the opportunity to craft out common goals for the residents that we serve in the Central Zone. We hope to elaborate more on these goals in subsequent issues.
In this first issue of 2021, we take a closer look at the new ways we can work together through the CoC model commissioned by AIC. A number of our partner providers in Central Health have been appointed to anchor care in their neighbourhoods and we have invited them to share how they are developing their CoC. At CHALK 2020, we had invited AIC, Care Corner, AMKFSC and a GP partner to expound on the critical success factors for a CoC and you can read more in our article on CHALK 2020. AWWA, Kwong Wai Shiu Hospital and TOUCH provide a glimpse of what a CoC can look like in this issue.
As a new lunar year begins, we have also taken the opportunity to refresh the layout of the newsletter, and rework it into a bi-monthly publication instead. You can click directly into the issue from the button below. And of course, I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Chinese New Year!
Yours Truly,
Ms Loh Shu Ching
Executive Director,
Division for Central Health
Tan Tock Seng Hospital & Central Health
