Raising Greater Awareness for Emergency Preparedness and for More to Be Skilled in CPR and First Aid

Ms Joan Pereira asked the Minister for Home Affairs whether the Ministry can work with media platforms to (i) raise greater awareness about emergency preparedness and (ii) encourage more members of the public to pick up skills, such as CPR and first-aid, in our community.

We use a variety of platforms, including broadcast, print and social media, to raise awareness about emergency preparedness and encourage members of the public to pick up life-saving skills.

We regularly publicise events, such as Emergency Preparedness (EP) Days, in our neighbourhoods and workplaces to generate public interest in picking up life-saving skills and knowledge.

Together with the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), we worked with Mediacorp to introduce EP and SGSecure messages into radio programmes, such as on Capital 95.8FM, and television (TV) programmes, such as Happy Can Already or "欢喜就好", Eat Already or "吃饱没" and Tanglin, to reach out to different segments of the population. More recently, MCI, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) worked with Mediacorp to produce a five-part series titled "It Will Never Happen Here". The series explores five different national security threats and discusses what the public can do to prepare themselves against these threats.

We have also rolled out feature stories in print media, such as Lianhe Wanbao and Berita Harian, to profile Singaporeans from different sectors who have played a crucial role in promoting and building EP. Stories of community first responders stepping forward to render assistance during emergencies are regularly publicised.

We have also been actively highlighting the importance of EP through social media platforms, for example, videos on SGSecure advisories like "Run, Hide, Tell" and "Press, Tie, Tell".

We will continue with our efforts to reach out to even more members of our population.

I thank the Parliamentary Secretary for his reply. I have one supplementary question. May I know what is the Ministry's progress in getting more Singaporeans aware of EP and picking up of cardiopulmonary resuscitation skills and so on?

We have made significant progress in our outreach efforts. As of December 2017, some 300,000 households have been successfully engaged through house visits where residents are briefed on the terror threat and SGSecure messages. The aim is to have at least one prepared citizen in every household. This means that in every home, there is at least one person who knows how to recognise and report suspicious behaviour and items, protect themselves and their loved ones, keep calm and reach out to others in times of crises.

As for EP Days, a total of 55 such EP Days have been held to date, and we will continue to roll out EP Days to the rest of the neighbourhoods in Singapore. We will continue to intensify these public outreach efforts.