Singaporean Minister of Health, Ong Ye Kung, led a delegation from the Ministry of Health, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Duke-NUS Medical School on a visit to Duke on Sept. 18 for a full day of meetings with leadership, faculty, and students. The crew visited the Duke Outpatient Clinic (DOC) to learn more about their population-health focused strategies for caring for individuals with high medical and psychosocial complexity.
State of the art strategies and data were shared representing the interdisciplinary approach that is deployed at the DOC. Compelling presentations were made by Drs. Alex Cho and Larry Greenblatt as well as Julia Gamble, nurse practitioner and advocate for individuals lacking housing, Jan Dillard from Department of Social Work, and Amy Royals from Case Management.
“I was so impressed with the poise and clarity of the presenters from our clinic," says Greenblatt. It is not every day for us to have high powered international visitors coming to learn our best practices.”
The visit, the first to Duke by a Singaporean minister since 2010, reaffirmed the nearly two-decade-long Duke-NUS partnership and included discussions covering topics ranging from precision medicine to accountable care.
Duke, NUS, and the Singapore government collaborated to open the research-intensive graduate medical school in Singapore in 2005, with a curriculum designed to develop an exceptional pool of leaders and creative thinkers who would push the boundaries of medicine.
In the years since, Duke-NUS has grown and expanded into a comprehensive academic medical institution conducting advanced biomedical research, educating health care leaders, and advancing patient care through an academic medicine collaboration with SingHealth, Singapore’s largest public health care cluster, which includes a network of hospitals and specialist clinics.