publichouse.sg

Publichouse.sg’s Hermione Poh recently met with Ms Lee Soh Hong, the author of "What Killed My Dad? Are Hospitals Safe?" Ms Lee has a website here which is dedicated to championing patients' safety: cancerstory.com.

Ms Lee, whose father died in October 2008, in one of the major hospitals here, has agreed to let us share parts of her book in which she recounts the events of her father’s death.

She wrote the book hoping to affect a change in our country’s healthcare system which, while winning praise internationally for being able to perform relatively well on a very minimal government budget, may also be wrought with a multitude of problems.

MY father was caught off-guard and unprepared to die in the hospital where he was admitted for a mild fever and minor abdominal pain. After six weeks of hospitalisation, he died of sepsis [败血症] secondary to pneumonia [肺炎] (refer Chapter 3) and urinary tract infection [泌尿道感染] (refer Chapter 4), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) [慢性阻塞性肺部疾病] (refer Chapter 17).

At one glance, the causes of his death are nothing uncommon. Have you ever pondered over how your loved one ended up with hospital-acquired infections? Do you know many of these infections are preventable?

This book details my father’s last illness, and also discusses the setbacks and weaknesses in our public hospital system. An “autopsy on the hospital” (refer Chapter 11) was performed in order to identify the root causes of my father’s untimely death—the same chain of misadventures can happen in any public hospital; it is systemic.

Her description of her father’s (and her) experience in a restructured hospital rings close to home for me as I have been working in one for about 10 years now.

I have been living in Woodlands for the past few years and have developed a love-hate relationship with this housing estate. Hate because it's so far from everywhere else, but love because it's quiet and there's large plots of empty land.

So when I read about the eldercare drama where it was reported that residents in Blocks 861 and 860 do not want an eldercare centre to be built in their void decks, with no head or tail as to why Sree Narayana Mission chose those blocks to begin with, I couldn't help but get curious. After reading some of the responses online by respected bloggers, I started getting annoyed. As if a place I identified with was being flamed. [Read here.]

All of us have at some point in our lives felt “out of sorts”, or just “under the weather”, and such emotional distress can lead to a physical ailment. But apart from seeing your friendly neighbourhood doctor for a prescription and that much needed medical certificate so that you can have a little mental holiday, some prefer an alternative form of therapy.

The Nature Society of Singapore (NSS) held a conference on the 16th of October entitled "Nature Conservation for a Sustainable Singapore", which preceded a weeklong Climate Change symposium. All content presented at the conference will be published next year.

A great variety of topics were covered in the three sessions of the day. The first session addressed the problems and issues faced by vulnerable and endangered species in Singapore. The second covered education, eco-tourism and legal issues and the third, habitat conservation and management.

We will be bringing you snippets of the sessions each week.

Dr Leong Tzi Leong, a Research Fellow with the Department of Biological Sciences in NUS, and Mr Chan Kwok Wai, a member of the Vertebrate Study Group of the Nature Society of Singapore (NSS) presented on bats in Singapore.

Singapore is home to more than 20 species of bats. Bats are the only mammals that have the ability to fly, and this is due to them having webbing on their fingers that stretch along their bodies. The closest native species to the bat is the Colugo, which does not fly but glides between places.