By Justin Ng (Phase II medical student)
Co-director of 11th SMEC 2015
2015 marks Singapore’s golden jubilee – a year apt for us to review how Singapore’s healthcare system has evolved in complexity over the years since her independence. Quality healthcare today entails a multi-disciplinary healthcare professional team caring for a single patient, replacing the concept of “one doctor to one patient”.
On 15 August 2015, we were delighted to welcome 350 first-year medical and nursing students from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUSMed), Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke- NUS) and NTU Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine), to the Centre for Translational Medicine (CeTM) on NUSMed’s campus for the 11th Student Medical-Nursing Education Conference (SMEC) 2015. It was our greatest honour to be able to host eminent pioneer generation healthcare professionals as speakers and provide them with a platform to share their knowledge and insights with a new generation.
Our guest-of-honour and former School Health Service Director, Dr Uma Rajan, started the morning with a heart-warming lecture, sharing both her life and her medical career with us. From monochrome pictures to color films, she discussed her journey as a medical school student and as a young doctor; the challenges she had to face as she pioneered the health booklet and become the School’s Health Service Director; and her own personal life as a cookbook writer and an avid dancer. Dr Rajan’s stories were a great inspiration to me, and I believe to our participants as well.
A distinguished panel – including Dr Rajan, Professor Pierce Chow of Duke-NUS and Senior Nursing Officer Madam Lee Yoke Yin, former Deputy Director of Nursing, SingHealth Polyclinics – then tackled topics like the future of research, the inter-professional relationships between nurses and doctors, and what the next generation of healthcare professionals could look forward to upon graduation.
Following the panel session, students participated in small-group sharing sessions, where they listened to first-hand accounts from patients, doctors and nurses. Networking sessions allowed students to mingle and discuss some of the medical dilemmas they may face as future healthcare professionals.
Concurrently, a total of 36 poster presentations from our seniors, classified into three categories: Science and Its Clinical Applications, Epidemiology and Quality of Public Health, were presented to a panel of 12 judges hailing from various tertiary institutions. It was indeed a very exciting morning as participants put their best foot forward to impress the judges, garnering 6 Distinction Awards and 9 Merit Awards.
To me, the conference was an amalgamation of little heart-warming moments – listening to the stories of Dr Rajan, watching students listen intently to the patient-professional healthcare teams (which reminded me of that moment when I was a participant just the year before), and their smiles at the end of the day. To put it simply, it was an experience that I would not trade anything for.
I strongly believe that 12th SMEC 2016 would be an even more impactful and meaningful event as SMEC continues to evolve from year to year on a grand scale. See you all here at NUSMed for 12th SMEC 2016!
