Learning from Bumrungrad Hospital

JGH Chairman Medical Board Prof Cheah WK taking notes of observations

The hospital planning team members asking lots of questions of our host

Unit Dose packing from Inpatient Pharmacy Automation deployment

at Bumrungrad to improve medication safety

The "ring" of medication for each patient

Work for the planning of the new Jurong General Hospital (JGH) has started a few months ago. In order to incorporate some of the best designs to improve patient experience/ safety and operational efficiency, we have set out to learn from the experiences of other hospitals in Singapore and overseas.

One hospital that we visited on Monday this week was Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. They've recently completed a new outpatient building and incorporated flexible modular design at their clinics that would allow the facility to match the growth of clinical services workload - something that JGH was keen to find out.

As we walked around the hospital, one of the things that quickly struck the JGH team was how "calm and peaceful" their outpatient clinic setting was even though they were seeing some 3000 patients every day - more than some of Singapore public hospitals. A conversation with their Group CEO revealed careful planning with an eye for operational efficiency, crowd separation to various floors with deployment of technology to ensure one-stop service (eg. medication orders are routed by system to the pharmacy directly, medication prepared and sent back to the clinic floor by pneumatic tube system within minutes, and pharmacist will dispense to patient after payment), and intelligent queue management as critical success factors. All of these are very helpful in our planning for JGH.

Attention to details is evident throughout the hospital. Rubberised keyboards to facilitate cleaning are used in patient's room. Privacy curtains are neatly tucked behind a wall panel to present an uncluttered and restful space. Semi-automatic sliding doors are used at clinic consultation rooms to ensure minimal effort by nurses while gentle enough so that they do not produce any noise when they are shut tight. Integrated deployment of IT to achieve real-time visibility of a patient's journey and condition and others are just some of the many learning the JGH team brought home with us.

We were also quite amused that Bumrungrad hospital takes a picture of their patient during registration at the clinic. While walking through the clinic, we realised why is it important. Instead of calling patient by name or by their queue number, staff would look out for the patient based on their photo at the waiting area and usher him/ her into the consult room. How interesting?

Overall, we had a fantastic few hours of learning at Bumrungrad Hospital and awed by the hospitality of our hosts. The day trip was indeed worth it - not to mention the delicious Thai food that we managed to savour while waiting for our flight at the airport!