Generalists to Help meet Singapore's Future Healthcare Needs

Dr Tan Wu Meng asked the Minister for Health how can the Ministry (i) strengthen and empower family physicians, general practitioners, internists and other doctors playing a generalist coordinating physician role to meet Singapore's future healthcare needs and (ii) ensure graduate medical training has flexibility amidst structure so that young doctors can build generalist experience without worrying whether relevant prior experience is disadvantaged if a training path is chosen later rather than sooner.

Generalist doctors play a central role in providing patient-centric and holistic care for an ageing population.

To strengthen and empower generalist doctors, the Ministry of Health is investing in training and development of broad-based professional competencies for all doctors. We plan to incorporate a set of core clinical curriculum of generalist skillsets in our medical schools’ undergraduate curriculum. For postgraduate training, efforts are underway to define the generalist competencies that should be integrated into the training programmes for specialists. For example, a mandatory Geriatric Medicine Modular Training Programme for non-Internal Medicine residents2 has been instituted as part of Residency training to equip residents with the necessary skills of managing elderly patients within their respective specialties.

We noted Dr Tan's comments on allowing flexibility in recognising generalist experience of doctors so that they are not disadvantaged when selecting their training path later. This is already the case for specialties with an Internal Medicine background where doctors spend three years in generalist Internal Medicine training before selecting one of the 15 different specialties for further training. The Ministry will study further if there is similar need for surgical specialties.