Increasing Participation Rate for Community Health Assist Scheme

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Health (a) which are the HDB towns and neighbourhood commercial centres serving HDB towns that have a below-average proportion of medical and dental clinics participating in the Community Health Assist Scheme (CHAS); (b) what is the Ministry's target for the proportion of private medical and dental clinics participating in CHAS by the end of this year; (c) how will the Ministry plan to increase incentives or reduce barriers for more clinics to participate in CHAS; and (d) what will these measures be.

Since the expansion of the Community Health Assist Scheme (CHAS) in January 2012, the number of participating General Practitioner (GP) and dental clinics has increased to 541 and 295 respectively.

We aim to have a good geographical spread of these clinics, especially in areas less well-served by polyclinics. All HDB towns have at least 40% of their clinics on CHAS, with the exception of Bishan and Kallang/Whampoa. There are 16 and 39 CHAS clinics in Bishan and Kallang/Whampoa respectively and residents in these two HDB towns also have access to subsidised care at polyclinics in the neighbouring towns of Ang Mo Kio, Toa Payoh and Geylang, which are located less than 2 km away.

We will continue to improve the distribution of CHAS clinics across the island. At the same time, we will also explore further improvements to CHAS, so that not only would more clinics be interested to participate, but more eligible Singaporeans would sign up and benefit from the scheme. We aim to reach out to another 100 GP clinics and 50 dental clinics by year-end. This would bring the number of CHAS clinics to close to half of all GP and dental clinics.

Through our outreach and engagement with GPs, we have also received valuable feedback on the features of the scheme and how we can further improve on administrative processes to enhance efficiency. To reduce possible entry errors, we have included a summary page, to allow GPs to verify their entries before the actual submission of claims. Later this year, we will be introducing further IT enhancements, to facilitate entry of diagnoses.

We will constantly review and explore ways to reduce barriers and encourage more GP and dental clinics to participate in CHAS.