National Healthcare Group (NHG) and Singapore Health Services (SingHealth), and Healthcare Academy have come together to upskill the workforce in Singapore's public healthcare sector.

Healthcare Academy has signed two MoUs with NHG and SingHealth, respectively. As part of this partnership, the agencies will set up company training committees (CTCs) at their respective cluster levels, to help workers whose jobs may be disrupted in the next five to ten years.

These CTCs could benefit more than 9,000 workers under NHG and 24,000 workers under SingHealth.

The future of healthcare sector in Singapore looks promising, with the expenditure of the industry expected to triple by 2030 from $17 Bn in 2013 to $44 Bn. Even the government has shown a lot of interest in the sector. By 2022, more public hospitals are expected to start that will be driven by organic expansion. Besides this the focus is also on advancing the Digital Healthcare Industry.

In fact, Singapore is not only focussing on providing technology to the healthcare industry but also expanding its competencies into areas such as digital health, bioinformatics and cognitive computing, etc. 

With more digitization and expansion into new areas, the nature of several jobs is expected to change. Jobs that could be most impacted include health attendants, hospital porters, storekeepers, pharmacy assistants, pharmacy technicians and driver, among others.

To secure the future of the workforce in these relatively easily replaceable jobs, the partnerships like the one Healthcare Academy, NHG & SingHealth have got into, our need of the hour. It is interesting to see how public institutions and academies are coming together to nurture the skills of the future among employees. Such collaboration is required in other sectors besides Healthcare as well.