Good Morning
Minister of State, Mdm Halimah Yacob
MCYS GPC Vice-Chair Denise Phua
President, NCSS, RADM(Ret) Kwek Siew Jin
NCSS Board Members
Passionate Members of the Social Service Sector
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen
Appreciation of Social Service Professionals and Volunteers
Thank you for having me here today. More importantly, thank you for your passion, dedication and hard work all these years taking care of our poor, our elderly, our needy, our vulnerable children and youth, our disabled and many more who needed a helping hand to stand tall and proud again.
The mark of a great society is not measured just by its economic successes. It is also measured by how well we take care of our weak, and our needy. In Singapore, we take pride in our economic successes. We also want to take pride in how we take care of the less fortunate amongst us.
Often, this requires an extra-ordinary effort of social service professionals and volunteers like you. For those of us more able, it is our responsibility to reach out to those less privileged. “Us” refers to our public, private and people sectors together. I will talk more about this partnership later.
Driving Forces Ahead
Three sets of forces will shape the development of our social service sector in the coming years – demographics, economics and expectations.
First, Demographics. Our population is ageing rapidly. Singaporeans, including those with disabilities and other medical needs, are living longer. The form of care required will be quantitatively and qualitatively different.
The numbers and proportion of singles are also increasing. As they age, the form of social care required will again be different from those with family support. For those who are married, family size is getting smaller and the extended family links are also becoming more fragmented. The conventional family unit through which we had relied on (as the first line of support and care) may be less readily available in future.
Next, Economics. Economic cycles will become shorter and more volatile. The chances of some segments of our population being knocked out of the economic mainstream, at some point in time, will increase. This means that our social services must cater to those in-risk, and also those at-risk.
Third, Expectations. Singaporeans will become increasingly sophisticated, well-informed and discerning. Their expectations and demands of social service and the quality of care will rise. They are also more likely to demand redress and service improvements should they be dissatisfied. Together, these forces provide both challenges and opportunities for the social service sector.
Responses
Our social services need to evolve with these developments in demographics, economics and expectations. Not only to keep pace, but to be ready for the future where possible.
Today, I would like to suggest three approaches which will be necessary to position the sector for the future – working inter-agency; evolving our service delivery models; and developing our people.
Working Inter-Agency at every step. A strong social safety net has many layers to help those in real need and avoid them slipping through the cracks. These layers include the provision of education and training for meaningful employment and social mobility, health care, housing and so forth. Our social safety net is robust. The government has provided resources through grants to VWOs and self help groups, funded NCSS and NVPC, and given direct aid to families under ComCare as part of our social safety net.
The government resourcing will continue to keep pace with our societal needs. There will always be room for improvement. It is not only about doing more but doing smart.
We can better prepare and even pre-empt many of our challenges with better inter-agency coordination upstream. As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. It means better and more effective early intervention measures. At the same time, it also means linking up both upstream and downstream services so that we can also help those who have moved from being at-risk to being in-risk. We are already seeing positive examples of such inter agency measures.
For example, education is key to social mobility and an important social leveller. A student who drops out of school and get into trouble with the law will cost society many times more to manage. This is not counting the negative social externalities yet. But if we work closely with MOE and MHA to develop options to identify and to help troubled and at-risk youth stay in school, learn a useful trade and stay off the streets, we will save us much effort and resources and improve many lives in the long term. We also have to recognise that notwithstanding upstream efforts, some youths would still drop out of school. We should have better integration within the overall system to ensure that we also help them, and where possible reintegrate them into mainstream schools.
There are also avenues for us to collaborate more with other agencies to improve the outcomes for those we serve. For example, the social service sector should be most interested to work with the work promotion, training and employment agencies to develop options to (i) gainfully employ and up-skill those in the at-risk groups impacted by the economic cycles, and (ii) engage those elderly for them to stay engage in the community and lead an active lifestyle, not because they need the money necessarily, but because it contributes to their social wellbeing.
Sometimes, investing in upstream measures and working inter-agency across the spectrum requires us to adopt a “lifecycle approach” to assessing cost and benefit. We may need to articulate the cost avoidance possible to obtain the necessary resources for upstream measures to avoid fighting day-to-day fires. We may also have to put forth why investments are needed to integrate and to co-ordinate the work across agencies, rather than fund the work of individual agencies themselves.
Next, we will need to constantly evolve our service delivery model. At the macro level, I firmly believe in the Public-Private-People model of service delivery. Each “P” has its own unique strengths and limitations. But together, we can complement each other and deliver better services for all.
Public sector provision is good for the basics and the masses. It provides the framework to complement the other parts of service delivery. A model that relies only on the Public Sector is not ideal. It is hard for a public policy or government programme to meet the need of all clients, especially those at the different ends of the spectrum. Similarly, it is difficult for government agencies to cater to the unique needs of each specific client. This is the problem of mass customisation.
Private sector provision is strong at resource allocation and efficient utilisation. For services with market demand and well-established pricing mechanism, they do well. However, most have few incentives to provide services for the truly needy who cannot afford to pay. We call this market failure. Nonetheless, even for these groups, the private sector has resources that we can leverage. Resources not just in financial means, but management expertise and innovative ideas.
The People Sector will always form the “heart” of our social service sector – double meaning intended. It means both the centrality of people to our sector and it also means the empathy that we desire in our sector. The People Sector is the sector that provides the personal touch, the customised solution and the vital informal network with the clients.
The “Many Helping Hands” approach is precisely this Public-Private-People partnership that we want to see. The government is but one of the helping hands, working alongside all of you. Just like a pair of hands, the palms, the different fingers and even the wrist, each playing their different, unique yet complementary parts. We must preserve this, even as the proportion of public, private and people sector effort in any particular sub-sector can and will be different, and will continue to evolve.
The way we structure the provision of our services will also need to evolve. We must appreciate the increasingly diverse needs. Small niche operators will always have a role in providing personal and specialised services. Large operators will be required to provide mass services at affordable prices. It is only sensible for us to have a range of service providers with different capabilities and different scales. MCYS will work with stakeholders to develop a more diverse range of operational models to meet different service needs.
We will also encourage greater experimentation in new service models that are suitable for our needs. We can adapt some best practices from elsewhere. But we must be prepared to do our own research and to develop unique models to suit our local needs. I look forward to hearing your ideas and suggestions.
Small and niche operators will always be challenged by the lack of economies of scale and lack of personal development opportunities for our people. But they are personal and cosy. What we need to do is to see how to maintain the personal and cosy shop front while better organising their backend services to deliver the same/better front end experience.
Ideas like the Social Service Hub @ Tiong Bahru where the various service providers not only share a common shop front and back room, but also provide better integrated services by simply co-locating together. They even share administrative and financial staff to allow social service professionals to focus on their delivery of services. It is such a successful model that foreign counterparts came to copy and replicated the idea elsewhere. Our only failure in this venture is our inability to collect royalty for our intellectual property.
Another example is new service concepts like the Therapy Hubs where small VWOs can pool resources to share therapists or other specialised resources. It provides more efficient use of resources and also more diverse and varied job opportunities to engage these professionals in our sector. Psychologists can be another specialised area to explore in time to come.
Yet other examples include the redesigning of our jobs and work flow to allow social work associates to complement experienced social work professionals to triage the cases. To use a Taekwondo analogy, instead of having the “black belts” to handle everything, we can allow the “black belts” to focus on the really tough cases, while allowing the “yellow belts” to slowly gain experiences and move up the experience ladder. Instead of only looking at academic qualifications, we can also see how to develop a system to recognise the experts in the respective areas for their experiences.
When I visited some facilities, one of the often heard challenges is having sufficiently qualified manpower to maintain individual medical records. Each organisation will have little incentive and capacity to develop a better record keeping system that even a non-staff nurse can operate. But if we put our minds together, maybe we can develop a system that can be shared across different organisations.
These are but some examples of how we can organise ourselves better to evolve our service delivery model. You will have more and better ideas than me and those that I just shared. But what it means is that it takes greater interaction to come up with such integration and sharing. We will all have to give up a little bit of something for us to all achieve much more together.
The third area that we need to focus on is caring for and developing our social service professionals. There can be no proper social service sector without properly trained and fully committed social service professionals. In recent years, we have come to recognise and accept the social service as a professional field in its own rights. It is not just some volunteers coming together to do some social cause at some point in time that they happen to have time.
MCYS and NCSS will continue to provide more scholarships and training awards to those committed to this sector. Academic result is just one aspect. More importantly we are looking for people with the balance of head, heart and hands; the commitment and desire to do good for the society. We must also recruit sufficient numbers for our people to recharge now, given the high intensity of the work and how emotionally draining the challenges may be. We will continue to make a strong commitment to capability and capacity building.
I am happy to hear that Singapore Association of Social Workers has accredited social workers to ensure professional standards. This will over time, systematically raise the professional standards of our people. MCYS hopes to work with you to develop other professionals in the sector. We will also groom leaders and potential leaders in the social service sector through the Professional and Leadership Development Scheme and Sabbatical Leave Scheme.
Good HR practices must start from recruitment; encompass proper induction, training, development, deployment and even post-retirement from the sector. It must be an end-to-end system to care for those who work in the sector. How we treat our people will in turn determine how able we are to attract others to join us. We need to do much more in tapping ideas from other sectors and sharing best practices amongst our social service organisations. Enthusiastic private practitioners in relevant specialist areas are most welcome to contribute your expertise and work with Social Service Training Institute to take us forward.
Conclusion
Ladies and Gentlemen. We have our work cut out for us. The challenges may be immense. The journey may be tough. But I have every confidence that we will overcome. To do more, do better and do smarter for our people.
Why am I confident? Not because any one of us have all the ideas. Not because any one of us are more capable than others. But it is because we have all our hearts at the right place. We will put our hearts, heads and hands together. We will do it.
In my short few months with the social service sector, I have visited some of your organisations. I spoke with a number of you and your staff – in large groups as well as smaller settings. All of you have impressed me with your passion and professionalism. I have met many who gave me the confidence that we have what it takes to overcome – that gumption in the gut to do good, the fire in the belly to do better, and always the twinkle in the eye that sparkles with another new idea and hope. It is because of you that I am confident. MCYS and NCSS can’t do it alone. But we will always work in partnership with you to better take care of Singaporeans. You will not walk this journey alone.
Thank you all and I wish everyone every success and meaning in all that you do.