Service standards in Singapore's hospitals.

Nursing is all about service: service to one's patients. So, too, is the art of medicine (I use "art" deliberately, because medicine is often surprisingly unscientific): it is about doing what can be done for the patient. The focus should ever be the patient and not what the doctor/nurse wants to do for themselves in that particular moment.

Singapore prides itself on its hospitals. I suppose it does so because it is comparing them to those of its relatively impoverished neighbours. I think this a funny comparison to make, since it tells us nothing about how good, in absolute terms, Singapore's hospitals are.

In the past few days, I have been visiting a Singaporean hospital to attend to someone close to me, who is not well. In doing so, I couldn't help but notice certain tendencies in the way the staff...both doctors and nurses...attended to their patients.

I watched, with some amazement, as the nurses were asked repeatedly for a cup, to pour water into, over the space of several hours. The conversations went a bit like this:

"Could we have a cup please?"

"I'll be back."

Three quarters of an hour passed by...and she didn't come back.

So, we asked two others who were probably nurses, since they were dressed in blue.

"Could we have a cup please?"

"We are doing our rounds.", was the unclear answer.

It wasn't clear what that meant, so we sat and waited for the better part of an hour until it became clear what "we are doing our rounds" meant: it meant "We are not going to get it for you, because we just can't be bothered."

They didn't come back.

This kind of conversation and response went on for some time, more, until, finally, I approached a senior nurse and asked for a cup and explained that no-one had got one, despite being repeatedly asked. She looked away, perhaps ashamed and walked off to a room marked "Pantry" to get one. What I was rather stunned to note was that this Pantry was less than 20 metres from the bed where we had been sat. Thus, in all those hours, not one staff member had been bothered to walk 20 metres to get a cup. Had I known it was there, I would have got it myself.

I learnt my lesson, however. When it came time to find some hot water, I didn't ask any of the staff there for assistance: I went to the pantry myself.

This kind of poor service response carried across to ALL requests to the staff, whatever its nature. "Could we have the results of such and such tests?" Ages would pass - and no results would come, unless reminded. "When is the Doctor coming down?" "Soon", would be the answer. An hour or two would pass and still the Doctor would not have come down. "Is there a room in the hospital to do exercise?" "I will get back to you." A day later, she has not.

Another notable tactic of the staff at this hospital is to pass responsibility: "Oh, I will ask such and such..."; "Such and such does that...". It never occurs to any of them that they, themselves, could complete the task requested immediately, without delay, by simply doing it. Instead, however, they prefer to delegate it to someone else - someone who is not around and by the time they are around, they will have forgotten the request.

After a while, one got the distinct impression that the hospital had a special policy of hiring morons only, for its staff positions. It seemed that simply NO-ONE wanted to do something upon being asked - but would always find a reason to delay doing it, that moment, until, of course, they had forgotten the request - deliberately or otherwise.

Singapore's hospitals are great buildings, but they don't have great staff, is my inevitable conclusion. As always, Singapore is strong on hardware and poor on software - or strong on infrastructure and poor on people. At least, that is the way it seems, if one watches how Singapore works.

The poor service I have observed in a Singaporean hospital is completely unnecessary. It just comes from people being LAZY. They are just too lazy to immediately attend to all matters requested - too lazy to do jobs themselves without delegation. It is time for an inviolable rule to be introduced, into all Singaporean hospitals, to improve service standards: any and all staff members should immediately attend to patient requests, without delegation and without delay, if it is within their power to fulfil that particular request. Were this simple rule implemented being sick in Singapore would become a whole lot better an experience.

The odd thing about all this is that Singaporean hospitals are not even free, as many hospitals in many developed countries are. Yet, the free hospitals I have experience of, offered much better service, than Singaporean hospitals do.

Why is an expensive Singaporean hospital offering poorer service than FREE foreign hospitals?

Perhaps the Minister for Health would like to explain this conundrum. Or perhaps readers have their own views on the situation.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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