NUS Medicine alumna receives the Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement
Published: 30 Sep 2020
Congratulations to NUS Medicine alumna Dr Sarah Tham (Class of 2020) for being one of the recipients of the Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement this year!
The award recognises outstanding academic and non-academic achievements of post-secondary students, particularly those who have made outstanding contributions to the community and demonstrated the spirit of innovation and enterprise.
Reflected in the following quote by doctor and writer Ethan Canin, “Everyone has an expressive urge. But it’s particularly pronounced in those who pursue medicine. It’s like being a soldier. You’ve seen great and terrible things”, Sarah entered medical school, wanting to see the range of human emotion and experience, so that she could connect with and meet people at their moments of greatest need, grief and suffering – and yet celebrate with them in their moments of joy.
She has actively sought opportunities to be in close touch with her local community and communities beyond. Locally, she has volunteered with Assisi Hospice to care for the dying, tutored children from broken families at Chen Su Lan Home, participated as a case writer at her local Meet the People Session, and worked with Healthserve to organise health screenings for migrant workers held in their own dormitories.
Having previously picked up sign language before entering medical school, she co-founded the club SIGNapse to teach healthcare students sign language and engage with the deaf community. Since its inception in 2016, SIGNapse has taught more than 1000 medicine, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry students. It has also offered free interpretation services at health screenings, in order to overcome the communication barrier and allowing the deaf to participate.
During her time at NUS Medicine, Sarah also served as the director of the Public Health Service (PHS) in 2017. It organises the largest annual student-run health screening in Singapore. In that year, PHS served approximately 1,100 Singaporeans with its comprehensive free screening and follow-up programme, and many more during its health exhibition.
Outside of Singapore, Sarah is also actively involved in medical missions and humanitarian work in locations such as Ipoh (Malaysia), Kathmandu (Nepal), Nagaland and Lucknow (India), and Sangkhlaburi (Thailand). She has worked with children with HIV, victims of sex trafficking, lepers rejected by their families, refugees and minority groups. She has a desire to serve in rural populations where basic healthcare and sanitation needs are unmet. In 2018, she led a team involving students and doctors to the slums in Lucknow. During this trip, they worked with a local organisation to provide education, women’s empowerment programmes and healthcare for slum dwellers, who were neglected by their own city.
She believes that such experiences are humbling. Rather than just training the mind, they train the heart to grow in compassion. Sarah is constantly re-learning that true healing does not necessarily take the form of medicine and surgery. It can be as simple as offering comfort to a broken spirit.
More recently, she has explored the role of technology in medical systems and education. During her experience as the director of PHS, the team worked with NUS Computer Science graduate students to design a functional health-screening application that was used during the actual screening programme. This application paved the way for more objective analyses of screening data, and more streamlined follow-ups for participants. She has also worked with Assoc Prof Tay Sook Muay from SGH and a team of students to design Medsense, a medical gamified education application that made use of natural language processing (NLP), which she presented at the European EC-TEL conference in 2018.
“I am greatly humbled and grateful to receive, let alone be nominated for the award. Going through the selection process allowed me to reflect on the experiences I’ve had throughout medical school. I was only able to have such experiences (both local and abroad) because I was given the opportunity to do so, and there were people who supplied the resources, invested their trust in me, and encouraged me when I encountered difficulties. I owe many thank you’s to those around me – my teachers, peers, patients, family, fiancé, and my God. I know they will tell me that the best way I can repay my thanks is by paying it forward, showing kindness and love to those around me, hopefully inspiring others to do the same.” – Dr Sarah Tham
Previous Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement recipients from NUS Medicine include:
| Year |
Award Winner |
| 2018 |
Dr Hargaven Singh Gill |
| 2016 |
Dr Kennedy Ng Yao Yi |
| 2013 |
Dr Benjamin Tan Yong Qian |
| 2012 |
Dr Chiong Yee Keow |
| 2010 |
Dr Ng Chew Lip |
