On 20 April 2024, Singapore’s Health Minister, Mr Ong Ye Kung, officiated the new Eastern General Hospital (EGH) Campus.
The EGH Campus is located beside Bedok North MRT and you can find the new Eastern General Hospital as well as the Eastern Community Hospital. They are expected to fully open in 2029 to 2030 by Singapore’s largest public healthcare group, SingHealth.
As you may already know (I hope), SingHealth oversees a network of hospitals, polyclinics and speciality centres such as Singapore General Hospital Hospital, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital and Changi General Hospital, among many others.
Better Healthcare Infrastructure
Reader: So how? Open 2029 or open tomorrow?
Health Minister Ong is managing expectations, promising that EGH will only be ready by 2030, but some services in EGH can most likely start operating “around 2026”. Some of these include teleconsulting and remote monitoring.
The rest will be run in phases.
Teleconsulting refers to many types of health services which require doctors to collaborate with other healthcare professionals, caregivers and you (patients) online, either by text messaging, video or audio calls.
Yes, visiting doctors via video calls is teleconsulting.
Similarly, telemonitoring allows patients to be assessed and looked after virtually. This eliminates the need to travel all the way to the hospital for a check-up, perfect for those who have difficulties moving about.
What is the difference between EGH and the Eastern Community Hospital?
Although they are grouped under the EGH Campus, EGH focuses on emergency care and inpatient and outpatient clinical care services such as surgery, cardiology, dermatology and other specialities. ‘
Meanwhile, the Community Hospital offers rehabilitative care services such as specialised programmes for our seniors, dementia patients and those with medical conditions that require support to reintegrate back into work.
Unique Features
More importantly, the EGH campus will have about 1,400 beds, and it will be a “pandemic-ready hospital”. Mr Ong said that the building and designing of EGH take into account the lapses in our hospitals during COVID-19. You can also read more about the strains on bed capacity on Goody Feed here.
According to Mr Ong, being “pandemic-ready” means that wards in EGH can be “quickly converted” for other uses and fit the need for high bed demand during a crisis.
Going back to the use of telehealth, Mr Ong said that EGH is unique in that it’s fully digitalized from the beginning. Healthcare professionals in EGH will be trained to offer telehealth services and are developing wearable sensors to remotely track the patients who conduct their prescribed exercises at home.
In fact, EGH is the first general hospital that can offer healthcare services before its completion, with the use of tech.
Such flexible systems and infrastructure can also allow for quick work reallocation and segregation if (touch wood) another pandemic dawns on us.
Instead of making large, drastic and last-minute changes to the healthcare infrastructure, such as converting carparks to screening spaces, the hospitals can adapt and operate smoothly.
Virtual Wards
First launched in April 2022, and its price matched to other ward services as mentioned in the 2024 Budget Debate, the Mobile Inpatient Care-at-Home programme (MIC@Home) will be implemented in EGH.
Like the sci-fi world of CyberPunk, EGH offers patients with selected medical conditions to be admitted to virtual wards where patients can have 24/7 access to healthcare professionals who can monitor them and provide feedback.
EGH will also have the Computer Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) system which allows its users, in this case, healthcare professionals, to be transported into a realistic simulation. This simulation helps them learn more about the illnesses they treat and surgery situations, by providing immediate feedback about potential equipment clashes.
It’s like gaming using a Virtual Reality Headset, except they handle serious cases relating to our health.
“East side, best side” may only be true about food. Changi General Hospital (CGH) has been tanking the healthcare industry for the Easties, and Mr Ong said that EGH can potentially alleviate the burden, in terms of limited capacity and overall high healthcare demand in that area.
While CGH is expected to expand, CGH and EGH’s use of telemedicine can ensure that the healthcare demand there is sufficiently met.
2030 is looking to be a good year for our healthcare scene, with eight polyclinics scheduled to be completed by then and the upcoming hospital in Tengah.