Singapore’s healthcare system tops leader board
BioSpectrum Asia has reported that, according to a recent index by Royal Philips, Singapore’s healthcare system has topped the international leader board on a number of key metrics.
The newly released first chapter of Royal Philips 2018 Future Health Index (FHI), which seeks to determine the readiness of countries in addressing global health challenges and in building efficient and effective health systems, found that Singapore tops the list for the efficiency of its healthcare system, with the most favourable ratio of spend versus health outcomes of all the 16 counties in the study. When it comes to satisfaction, 82 per cent of Singapore’s healthcare professionals said that they feel that the healthcare available to patients meets their needs, and 63 per cent of the general population agreed.
Singapore’s healthcare system was also found to score well for technology adoption, with the highest end-use rate of electronic health records (EHRs) in hospitals per hospital beds and in terms of software solutions for inventory management, for example. The FHI identified care as an area of improvement for Singapore. The country scored below average on this, possibly due to a lower than average density of skilled healthcare professionals and number of hospital beds in relation to the size of the population.