Foreign Healthcare Staff in Public Hospitals and Polyclinics

Mdm Speaker, effective communication between healthcare staff and patients is important to ensure patient safety. Therefore, public healthcare institutions have taken steps to ensure that foreign staff are able to communicate effectively with our patients. For instance, they conduct local assimilation programmes, including language courses, for example, English, Malay and so on to familiarise foreign healthcare staff with our local clinical practice, as well as language and cultural context, to enable better communication between foreign staff and patients.

About 35% of foreign staff recruited in the last five years had participated in at least one language programme. Some of the foreign staff are Malaysians or have been in Singapore for some time and are already familiar with our language and culture, and therefore may not need to attend such programmes. The Ministry also provides the public healthcare institutions with a training fund, to support foreign nurses in enrolling for language courses. More than 2,000 foreign nurses have benefited from this scheme between 2009 and 2013.

Pictorial guides are available in our public healthcare institutions to aid staff in their communication with patients. In addition, our public healthcare institutions ensure that a good mix of local and foreign healthcare staff is rostered for each shift. They work as a team to care for our patients. In some institutions, foreign staff may also partner colleagues who speak the language of the patient, if necessary.

With these measures in place, the risk of miscommunication is reduced. Therefore, only a few public healthcare institutions have assessed that it is necessary to employ interpreters for local languages.

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MOH and the public healthcare institutions will continue to encourage foreign healthcare staff to improve their communication skills, so that they can converse accurately and independently with our patients.

I thank the Parliamentary Secretary for the answers. I have three supplementary questions. The first is whether MOH has done any study to see what percentage of time is spent by staff who have to partner others to help with the interpretation duties and whether that has impacted their work because it is added to their workload.

The second question is: in a previous Parliamentary Question reply, MOH stated that the language training programme is about 30 hours long spread over a few weeks. Is there evidence that the healthcare professionals will be equipped with sufficient language skills to communicate with non-English speaking patients after this 30-hour course? And whether there will be some proficiency tests that are conducted for healthcare workers, especially those who do not attend these language courses at all.

Lastly, I am not sure if there was a reply to the part about the full-time interpreters. I would like to know how widespread is the practice for full-time interpreters to be in hospitals. Thank you.

Madam, I would like to thank the Member for the questions. I do not have the figure with regard to the time spent by the staff on language coaching. It is part of the work process. I would like to share with the Member that many of our staff look at it as part of the process of working with each other. If you look at nurses in the public healthcare or the nursing communities, it is a vibrant group of people working together to see how they can care for the patient. Even though it is about 30 hours on average, as what the Member mentioned, but I am happy that beyond this, the whole group of nurses will help one another. Many of these foreign nurses or healthcare workers will pick up from the job, from the interactions. The initial courses that they take are certainly very helpful for them, as part of their engagement process.

It is about how we monitor them. We monitor them very closely in the sense that we want to make sure that the communications with the patient is done properly as part of the care process. I want to assure the Member that we actually monitor them and we take this seriously because at the end of the day, we want our patients to be well cared for.

For interpreters, as I have mentioned in my answer earlier, at the end of the day, it is about working together, and how we can serve the patient better. We have found that by working together with the different nationalities, and those who are fluent in certain

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languages, we have found that we are able to cope. As a result, we do not need as many interpreters as what the Member mentioned earlier. We find that it is not necessary, but we do have interpreters in a few of these institutions that require them.