新加坡卫生部：我们很需要医护人员！

To this end, we will continue to work with public healthcare institutions (PHIs) and the community care sector to attract and retain manpower across the board.

For nurses, we announced the Award for Nurses' Grace, Excellence and Loyalty (ANGEL) scheme last month. This would allow us to improve the attractiveness of the profession and retain the nurses we have.

We are engaging Allied Health Professionals to better understand their needs and to co-create the vision for their professions, with a view to come up with a National Allied Health Strategy. We are working on the PharmForce initiative to look into manpower development, shaping pharmacy practice to meet population needs, promoting wellness and building resilience of our pharmacy workforce and increasing visibility and recognition for the profession.

Operations and support staff play important roles in our public healthcare system. Our healthcare clusters have embarked on job redesign initiatives to enhance the career value proposition and better attract and retain them.

Across the board, PHIs will continue to keep salaries competitive. For example, starting salaries for nurses, allied health professionals and pharmacists were increased by up to 12% in 2023.

We have done the same for the community care sector with the recent salary guidelines to keep salaries competitive and provide greater transparency to jobseekers and workers in the sector. These guidelines will be reviewed regularly to ensure that they are up-to-date. We hope that the guidelines will help attract and retain workers across all job groups, including support staff.

We will continue to provide funding to community care organisations and PHIs to support them in keeping their salaries competitive.

I also stressed the importance of ensuring the well-being of our healthcare workers. I thank Mr Ang Wei Neng and Mr Louis Ng for their concern on workload of junior doctors and rest time for nurses.

We are working with clusters on measures to support the welfare and well-being of healthcare workers, including doctors and nurses. For doctors, this will include clearer work hour guidelines, reviews on work processes to improve efficiency and workload balancing and to enhance support for staff. As the context differs from healthcare institutions, these changes may take time to effect.

On ensuring sufficient rest for nurses, our healthcare clusters no longer actively roster nurses on the PAPA shift pattern. However, this may happen occasionally when there are operational exigencies, such as when there is unplanned absence amongst staff and the ward needs to ensure the appropriate skills mix amongst nurses on duty to ensure patient safety. When this happens, measures are in place to support affected nurses, such as by rostering them on shorter shifts that week and allowing flexibility for swaps.

未完待续,请点击[下一页]继续阅读