The Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health often hosts interns and elective students from Singapore and internationally. These placements offer a great opportunity to understand more about public health and contribute to some of our research and translational efforts. These students often stay in contact throughout their careers and become part of the School’s extended family, or indeed, faculty.
This week we talk to Tan Hao Yi who for the last four weeks has been working with our Public Health Translational Team. With his medical background, positive can-do attitude and good humour, he became an invaluable support to researching, drafting and compiling sections of our weekly COVID-19 Science Reports.
Tell us about your course and what bought you to the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health.
I am a Singaporean year 6 (final year) medical student at the University of New South Wales in Australia. I came back to Singapore to do a number of electives in Singapore hospitals because I know I want to come back to work here after graduating.
After completing only one out of four months of clinical electives, COVID-19 hit Singapore and all my electives were cancelled. I wanted to do something constructive to fill my time before returning to Australia, so I got in touch with Associate Professor Jason Yap and asked if I could transfer my elective to the School of Public Health, albeit at a rather short notice.
Assoc Prof Yap placed me with the School’s Public Health Translational Team (PHTT) and I immediately joined the team responsible for preparing the weekly COVID-19 Science Report, which reviews the latest literature relevant to managing the COVID-19 outbreak.
Long story short, my plans got wrecked by COVID-19 but I was given a chance to take revenge by helping Singapore fight it!
Tell us about your time working on the Science Report for COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Science Report is submitted weekly to the Chief Health Scientist of the Ministry of Health, and was created and updated on an ongoing basis by a team of several researchers. I looked after various sections of the report (e.g., therapeutics, clinical characteristics) and helped to integrate other sections and to prepare the final document.
This is a very novel experience for me, as I have never contributed to a national health emergency in such an acute and meaningful way before, and I did so with a very helpful and nurturing team (thanks PHTT!). I have learnt so much while being involved in this project, but perhaps the greatest lesson would be the importance of communication in an acute and volatile situation.
The whole COVID-19 situation has highlighted the importance of international and intranational communication and cooperation, as well as the need for Singapore to maintain a competent and efficient health system. All the research being pumped out would be fairly pointless if there was no established chain of command and communication to bring this information to the headquarters and frontline healthcare workers to be translated into action.
Throughout this outbreak, there has been much fake news and fearmongering in the general population. The quantity of fake news and the potential devastating impact of fear has been demonstrated briefly in the aggressive grocery shopping. This further emphasises the need for accurate information dissemination.
Is public health something you would like to pursue as a career? If so, which area and why?
Yes, I do want to pursue public health as a career. However, I am quite unsure of which area and how I would get there. There are different options for someone like me (a medical student who will soon graduate and enter the workforce as a junior doctor). I could practise as a clinical doctor in some speciality and then branch out into public health, or enter the Preventive Medicine Residency. I have not quite decided which route to take yet.
What I am sure of though is that I want to be able to make a difference in the lives of Singaporeans in need, and maybe even people in other countries, for example, in community care or integrated care for the elderly and poor, especially given Singapore’s ageing population.
In a conversation with a close friend, I once said “rich people don’t really need good public health as much as poorer people do”. Although that statement is not absolutely true nor universally applicable, I do think that the lack of good public health will disproportionately affect the lower socioeconomic classes in general, because people from the higher socioeconomic classes can afford alternatives such as private healthcare or even go overseas.
I have had the privilege of being born into an upper-middle class family, and I have never had to worry about my healthcare needs. I believe that I should use the gifts I have been blessed with to contribute to society and especially to uplift those who have not been as privileged.
While I know that Singapore’s healthcare system is already very good, we can still improve, and that the best is always yet to be. I hope that I can be a positive change in that respect.
So, to answer your question more succinctly: I don’t know which area of public health I want to work in, but I know what kind of impact I want my work to have – justice and help for those who are in need.
Tell us something surprising about you that people may not know.
Growing up, I never wanted to study medicine, nor did I want to do public health! But one day when I was 15, I (unwillingly) went on a medical mission trip with my church to rural Cambodia. It was there that I discovered that I wanted to become a doctor. The following year I went back with the same team, but I realised that short-term medical mission trips and relief aid did not really help in the long term. Instead, it would take larger scale development of infrastructure in order to truly help. I didn’t know it then, but this was the start of my introduction to the need for public health!