Singapore’s Minister of Health Ong Ye Kung, wrote a letter to the healthcare workers in Singapore to boost their morale.
Ong’s letter comes in the wake of Omicron cases in Singapore surging and threatening to overwhelm the public healthcare system, straining the healthcare workers on the frontlines further.
In his letter, he outlined some measures to help lighten the burden on them, including the Singapore Armed Forces agreeing to provide trained medics to support hospitals.
Here is his letter in full
Dear colleagues
You are probably receiving this message while inundated with a heavy workload, due to the high number of daily Omicron cases.
I want to let you know that the Ministry of Health and your management will continue to do our best to support you, to pull through this difficult period, just as we ensured you have priority to vaccines and boosters, spread out cases by leverage Covid-19 Treatment Facilities and General Practitioners, and implemented the difficult no visitors policy. We will continue to do whatever we can.
To help further reduce patient loads, in the coming days, we will push out public messages to encourage those with mild symptoms to recover from home, and for employers to not require medical certificates (MCs) from workers infected with Covid-19. At the request of the Healthcare Services Employees Union, sick leave of healthcare workers can be recorded as hospitalisation leave during this period. For our foreign colleagues, we will also be starting a Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) with the Philippines soon, and restoring the VTL quota with India.
To address manpower shortages, we are mobilising our healthcare volunteer corps and have also reached out to the Singapore Armed Forces, who has kindly agreed to support us with trained medics, for hospitals facing the heaviest patient loads. We are deeply appreciative of the SAF.
For our healthcare workers, whether Delta or Omicron, I know your workload has been heavy. But MOH and the Multi-Ministry Taskforce will also need to continue to explain to the public that Omicron is less severe than Delta because from the public’s point of view, they need to know that Omicron poses less of a risk. That way, they can respond to the infection wave calmly, recovering from home when their symptoms are mild, instead of rushing to the hospitals.
Some of you may also wonder why we are streamlining the safe management measures now. So long as we hope to regain our normal lives, we will have to deal with an Omicron transmission wave. It is a force of nature, and the micro rules really do no make a difference to the pandemic at this stage. Instead, we want to focus the public on the key measures that can still help flatten the transmission wave, namely group sizes, masking, and vaccinated-differentiated measures. That is why we have not made any changes to these rules. For the rest, we should streamline them.
The pandemic has been going on for over two years now. Like you we want to see the pandemic pass. If Singapore is like other countries, we should see cases fall — even rapidly — in the coming few weeks. With each day our society becomes stronger and we move closer to normalcy. So hang in there for a while more. It is no longer light at the end of tunnel, but barring unforeseen circumstances, it is something within our grasp.
Please convey our thanks to your family members and loved ones too, for supporting you through these difficult times. Take care, and thank you.
Ong Ke Kung
Minister for Health
Images source: The Singapore Army Facebook and Tan Tock Seng Hospital Facebook (Images used for illustration purpose only)