Singapore Health System from this American’s Perspective — Part 3

Hospitals

Singapore has a mix of public and private hospital systems. They have 14 public hospitals and nine private hospitals (“List of hospitals in Singapore,” 2020). There are eight public and eight private general hospitals. General hospitals provide 24-hour emergency care, inpatient, and specialist outpatient services. The rest of the hospitals are a mix of women and children’s, cancer, cardiac, eye, skin, neuroscience, and dental care. (“Doctor’s Guide,” 2021; “List of hospitals in Singapore,” 2020). Singapore has an internal accreditation process, and the Ministry of Health (MOH) carries out inspections to verify compliance. Hospitals establish quality assurance committees to monitor and evaluate the safety and quality of their practices, procedures, and services. The MOH benchmarks Singapore’s system against international counterparts and conducts annual patient experience surveys (Tikkanen, Osborn, Mossialos, Djordjevic, & Wharton, 2020). The government is exploring a more formal process for monitoring quality within Singapore so that their evaluations would be comparable to international standards (“Singapore’s Healthcare System,” 2019). Seven of the hospitals in Singapore are already voluntarily Joint Commission International (JCI) certified (“JCI-Accredited Organizations,” 2021). JCI certified hospitals are a mix of public and private, but generally larger and nationally recognized institutions (“JCI-Accredited Organizations,” 2021).