At NCIS, we have a team of Medical Social Workers working together with our doctors and medical professionals to provide support for our patients and their loved ones in the course of their illness. They provide assistance in the areas of financial needs, care needs, as well as emotional support to cope with the disease.
If you need to seek assistance from our Medical Social Workers, do speak to your doctor so that they can help make a referral. Thereafter, your Medical Social Worker will assess your resources and needs before sourcing for suitable funds and resources to ensure that your needs are met. In some cases, financial documents are required so it helps to get these documents ready to facilitate the process.
We provide counselling to patients and their loved ones to help support them in coping with the impact of their medical condition and the resultant life changes.
We assist patients who present with complex psychosocial and discharge-planning needs, conduct timely assessment and interventions to help patients and/or families cope with personal, emotional and biopsychosocial issues affecting hospitalisation and the delivery of care through appropriate linkages with community resources and supportive counselling.
We assess and administer financial assistance for patients or families who have difficulties affording their medical bills. While doing so, we also aim to improve responsiveness and accessibility of financial assistance schemes.
Psychosocial assessment, counselling support, as well as practical assistance are provided to patients who may be admitted under the circumstances of a crisis. This includes patients who experience family violence, sexual assault, self-harm or suicide attempts, abuse and/or neglect, amongst others.
We are involved in clinical supervision to social work students from NUS and are also actively engaged in inter-professional teaching to the medical students from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (YLLSoM) through lectures, talks and patient experience attachments. We are also involved in the national MSW Chapter training, as well as regional workgroups with government and voluntary organisations.
The Department runs support groups to further provide educational and emotional support to specific groups of patients and their loved ones. One of their support groups is Kids Connect. Kids Connect is a holiday support programme targeted at children (7 to 12 years old) whose parents or loved ones are impacted by cancer. The group sessions, which comprise play and other creative activities, aim to help children moderate their feelings by providing avenues to express these feelings, and strategies to cope with them.
All Singaporeans are covered by heavy government subsidies of up to 80 per cent of the total hospital bill in acute public hospital wards.
Some of the government-funded schemes include Medisave, MediShield, Medifund and the Medication Assistance Fund.
To find out more about these schemes, visit:
