A Care Model for a Singapore Hospital

Our team, in collaboration with a design studio and architect firm in Singapore, worked with Alexandra Health System to inform a care model for their latest hospital to be built in the Woodlands region of Singapore by 2023.

Using systems thinking and field ethnography, we uncovered insights on the public healthcare needs of the region and made sense for how they might shape a care model fit for purpose. A constraint was that beds were an increasingly scarce resource in Singapore’s ageing population, and political pressures were mounting for this need to be met yet at affordable cost.

By studying activities and programmes of surrounding social service organisations, we discovered underlying capabilities that had potential to be applied from a community development to a non-acute care context. This led to the development of a distributed care model for non-acute care, deploying a local network of nurses that would support patients with chronic, non-acute needs.