SIA rolls out plan on manpower planning and deployment for future national crises

Volunteers will be trained in peacetime so they can be redeployed to various healthcare support roles if a future crisis arises, under an MOU with the Health Ministry and the Public Service Division.

From April 2024, the SG Healthcare Corps will facilitate the training & deployment of about 50 SIA & Scoot cabin crew who will volunteer their time as SIA Group Ambassadors at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital and Changi General Hospital.

These SIA Group Ambassadors will be part of a pool of around 200 trained SG Healthcare Corps care volunteers who will serve alongside the healthcare workforce to meet the needs of patients.

This initiative is part of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by Ministry of Health (MOH), Public Service Division (PSD) and the Singapore Airlines (SIA) Group on 15 January 2024, to build on a collaboration that began in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It will focus on two key areas: 

1. peacetime training and volunteer deployment of cabin crew in support care roles, and
2. tabletop exercises to stress test our crisis response protocols.

To recap, the onset of the pandemic saw an urgent need for manpower across healthcare facilities that year. At the same time, with borders closed and air traffic declining, there was surplus manpower within the SIA Group, particularly amongst cabin crew and pilots.

Working closely with MOH and PSD, the SIA Group redeployed more than 2,000 staff to frontline roles in various public agencies and healthcare institutions from March 2020. As part of this, Care Ambassadors, which included over 900 cabin crew, served to support healthcare institutions in patient care, allowing other healthcare staff to tend to patients who needed extra attention.

Staff of SIA & Scoot were also temporarily redeployed as Transport Ambassadors, Contact Tracing Executives, and Social Service Office Processing Officers.

Here is a list of core roles of an SIA Group Ambassador during Peacetime:

1. Assist patients and residents with activities of daily living under the guidance of nurses and other healthcare team members.

2. Assist nurses with basic care procedures and activities, such as:

• Attending to patients’ and residents’ call bells, and relaying requests to nurses in charge of patients and residents;
• Taking weight and height of patients and residents upon admission;
• Measuring vital signs using monitoring machines;
• Assisting to lift and/or transfer patients and residents from their beds to chairs, trollies, commodes, and vice versa;
• Assisting to ambulate patients and residents, positioning and/or turning them on beds; and
• Assisting patients and residents with changing clothes, where appropriate.

3. Assist nurses with nutritional care and needs of patients and residents, such as:

• Assisting to feed patients and residents (oral feeding only) when necessary, with basic monitoring of swallowing (before, during, and after oral feeding);
• Serving meals; and
• Checking the amount of water and portion of food taken by patients and residents.

The MOU was signed by Chan Yeng Kit, Permanent Secretary (Health), MOH, Teoh Zsin Woon, Permanent Secretary (Development), PSD, and Goh Choon Phong, Chief Executive Officer, SIA.

Commenting on this, Chan said: "Even as MOH continues to build up our healthcare workforce to meet the needs of the population and implement plans to prepare for future national crises, we are growing our pool of trained healthcare volunteers through the SG Healthcare Corps. This will strengthen the resilience of our healthcare system both during peacetime and in the next crisis."

Teoh added that the MOU will enable the PSD to "lock in and strengthen a successful public-private partnership that was forged during the COVID-19 pandemic."

"By coming together as a SGUnited team to strengthen partnerships during peacetime, we will be even stronger and more prepared to meet any challenges that can come our way in the future," she said.

Finally, Goh shared his views on how such a partnership benefitted those involved in 2020, saying: "Working closely with MOH and PSD, we successfully transitioned over 2,000 of our people to roles with various public agencies and healthcare institutions. Almost everyone they met in these jobs praised their warm and caring nature, professionalism, and dedication to customer service.

"Being exposed to different types of support roles also benefitted our people, who used their experience and new skills to enhance our customer service. Today’s agreement formalises our partnership with MOH and PSD, establishing a pathway to seamlessly redeploy our people once again, should a similar situation arise."

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