What are your first areas of concern for CGH at the moment?

One of my first area of concern is the challenge of continuously providing quality service for all our patients and meeting the ever increasing demands of more knowledgeable patients and families. We have to build on the quality service culture that has been established by inculcating a culture of continuous learning which helps every staff to realise the potential within them. Through structured quality training programmes, staff will be conscious of good service delivery and how we could achieve this. Quality service will also require staff to continuously upgrade their professional knowledge and skills to deliver the best care possible to our patients.

I also want to continue with the feedback systems that CGH has pioneered, meeting not only patients, but also the GPs and Polyclinics and our other healthcare partners to ensure that we are meeting all their needs to the best of our abilities.

In addition, I will be working closely with our doctors to develop our core services. We will identify the services needed by our community and train specialists to serve our people better in these areas. The community will then be able to take advantage of the excellent care that CGH can provide.

How can CGH continue to gain the confidence of the community in the east?

CGH has done a very good job in the last three years in promoting itself to be a hospital for the community. It has through its quality and feedback culture built itself to be truly a hospital for the people.

From here, we now need to look into how we can further improve our service delivery. Presently the process for any patient from a GP or Polyclinic to CGH and then CGH to a tertiary centre or back to the GP or Polyclinic is rather fractured. We should aim to create a seamless system where there is minimum hassle for the patient when they go through the process. For example if we have a patient who needs to be referred to the National Heart Centre, we want to make the process seamless and easy for the patient. This will have to be done with our cluster partners, the GPs and Polyclinics. IT will certainly play an important role in the implementation process.

I believe the community will have even more confidence in the hospital, when they benefit from the improvements in service and care.

How would you describe your management style?

I believe in management by walking. That means visiting the care delivery team at their workplace, seeing and understanding how things are done, getting feedback and helping to improve care delivery. As a CEO, my job is not merely to direct the vision to meet national health care goals. I see my job as being here to support the care delivery staff to do their job better, to provide the support and resources to get things done and at the same time to develop staff potential to the fullest.