Help for Healthcare Workers to Stay and Build Their Careers in Public Sector

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Health whether any schemes are available to encourage administrative and support healthcare workers to stay and build their careers in the public healthcare sector.

Mr Speaker, the Ministry of Health (MOH) actively works with the public healthcare clusters and community care organisations to ensure that they are able to recruit and retain sufficient staff to meet their needs. This includes ensuring competitive salaries, career development opportunities and safe working environments.

For administrative and support healthcare workers, we pay special attention to redesign their roles and career pathways so that they have more development and career progression opportunities. MOH has worked with the clusters to develop the Care Support Associate (CSA) and Patient Service Associate (PSA) roles, which incorporate an expanded mix of patient caregiving, administrative and operational tasks. This is currently being rolled out, with training support available, to enable existing staff to take up the expanded roles.

I thank Minister of State for the reply. We have the Award for Nurses’ Grace, Excellence and Loyalty (ANGEL) scheme for nurses, which is a financial retention scheme, very similar to the CONNECT Plan that we use to retain teachers. That has shown to work.

So, could I ask whether we can have a similar programme or just extend the ANGEL programme to the administrative and support staff, who work alongside our nurses and should be equally valued as well?

I thank the Member for the question and for constantly championing the needs of the healthcare workers. I know that he has also raised this question separately. We have not extended the ANGEL scheme, which was specifically meant for nurses, because we take different approaches. There are different considerations for different healthcare workers. We do not have the same scheme for nurses and doctors, for example.

We do take into account factors, such as the strength of the recruitment pipeline, the global competition, the nature of the jobs and their career structure and looking at what is needed for that particular role and that particular healthcare group. Nurses make up a large number. There is a large number of healthcare workers. They make up a large proportion of the workforce in the public healthcare institution. Hence, it becomes necessary to have a scheme like ANGEL to retain them, very much like why teachers, when they have a whole group of workers who are in the public sector that needs to be retained. So, that scheme was specifically meant for them.

We do consider the needs of all our healthcare workers and, indeed, the administrative and support healthcare workers are as important to us, but we do it in a different way. We regularly review the salaries of all the healthcare workers in the public healthcare institutions to ensure that their salaries are fair and competitive.

And we will continue to look at various ways to attract and retain them, various measures to ensure that they are future-ready, that we are supporting mid-entry entrants, for example, into the sector, providing them with opportunities to have job redesign, career development and also ensuring that they have a conducive and age-appropriate work environment.