When Singapore’s newest integrated acute and community hospital, Woodlands Health, welcomed its first patients on Dec 22 with the opening of its specialist clinics and 40 community hospital beds, it underscored two important points. The first, of course, was the importance of adopting an integrated care model. The second was the continuing need to disperse top-level healthcare facilities across Singapore. On the first account, Woodlands Health is an ambitious exercise, being a facility with acute and community hospitals sharing the same building so that patients can be seamlessly moved from acute to step-down care with the same doctors in charge. The 7.7ha facility will fully open the rest of its services, including the emergency department and acute wards, in May 2024. It will eventually have 1,000 acute and community beds, and almost 400 beds in its long-term care facility, with the capacity to expand to 1,800 beds to meet future needs.

The convenience of integration is undeniable for the sick. When it is suitable to transfer patients, they would merely cross the corridor to the community hospital wards to continue being cared for, as opposed to moving into a completely different facility. Woodlands Health attests to the evolving logic of building community hospitals in the first place. According to the Ministry of Health (MOH), community hospitals provide medical services for patients who require a short period of continuation of care, usually after their discharge from acute hospitals. The types of care available at the community hospitals include medical, nursing and rehabilitation care. Patients can make the transition from acute to rehabilitative care seamlessly so as to begin their rehabilitation journey early.