The student-led Public Health Screening (PHS) was successfully held for the ninth year, on 11 and 12 October 2014. Over 500 medical and nursing students volunteered at Clementi Central to help more than 1400 participants learn about their health status and ways to safeguard it. Many partner organisations were also present in a joint effort to promote health and wellbeing through a series of public exhibitions.
The focus for PHS 2014 was to introduce an expanded and comprehensive post-screening follow-up programme for participants. The close partnership and collaboration between PHS, the National University Health System (NUHS), and its primary care partner the Frontier Family Medicine Clinic (FMC) were key to enabling the follow-up expansion. In particular, the partnership with Frontier FMC, a primary care provider in Clementi Central, was an entirely new concept that PHS 2014 had put in place to increase the effectiveness of follow-up for PHS participants.
The new follow-up programme has four phases which stretch over a six-month post-screening period and is projected to end by 31 March 2015.
In the first and second phases, PHS participants with abnormal screening results have the option of a free complimentary review at Frontier FMC, if they did not already have their own family physician. The first phase particularly caters to participants with abnormal results detected immediately during the screening, while the second phase caters to participants with abnormal blood test results that required more time for processing and risk stratification. The third phase involves reaching out to participants who had chosen to follow up with their family physicians or polyclinics, and the fourth phase involves house visits to participants who had defaulted on their follow-up appointments, in a bid to identify any barriers to follow-up and provide solutions wherever possible.
A total of 202 participants were referred to Frontier FMC in phases one and two, with 131 of them turning up for their appointments. In addition, approximately 160 participants were engaged in phases three and four of the programme.
It is the close collaboration between PHS, NUHS and Frontier FMC that have helped make this event a beneficial experience for participants, particularly in ensuring that as many as participants as possible who needed further evaluation and interventions were linked to appropriate care. Going forward, this expanded and comprehensive follow-up programme will continue to remain a cornerstone of future PHS events.
