Hospitals in Singapore are investing in additional manpower and expanding services to take in more elderly patients.

According to one hospital, the number of patients aged between 45 and 65 who are treated for heart attack, increases by up to 15 percent each year.
Tan Tock Seng Hospital is expanding its expertise in cardiology, after treating more older patients for emergency angioplasty that follows a heart attack.
Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s head of cardiology, Dr Ho Kheng Thye, said: "When a patient comes in with a heart attack, there is emergency angioplasty performed to open up the blood vessel as quickly as possible, and our results are actually good.

"The survival rates for the elderly are equivalent to patients who are aged 50 or so. About 10% of the patients die during the hospital visit, but once they survive that period, survival beyond a period of one month is good as well, which is pretty much comparable to international centres."

Providing services for the elderly is not new to Tan Tock Seng Hospital. In fact, it is the first hospital to provide geriatric care in 1989.

And continuing that tradition, it will be expanding some of its services to cater to a growing elderly patient load.

This includes training more staff on how to deal with older patients like 79—year—old Teresa Carmen Rodrigues, who is receiving arthritis treatment.
Teresa now needs additional attention as she has hurt her wrist when she fell recently.

She is accompanied by her husband on her visits and is kept informed about her progress by her occupational therapist.

Teresa’s husband, Rudolph Aloysious Rodrigues, said: "After you have been treated by them...they will explain to you what you have to do and not to do at least 24 hours after your treatment.....so, that is very good for the elderly."
Tan Tock Seng Hospital is also training its staff to sniff out problems related to old age.

Dr Ho said: "We have a heightened sense of awareness that it is important to pick up problems in the elderly at an early stage. That’s because if the problem goes unchecked for a long time, then the elderly have more difficulty in recovering as compared to a younger person... and in this regard, recovery of function is greatly emphasized upon."

Also beefing up its programmes to cater to more elderly patients is Alexandra Hospital.

It has a group of volunteers who will go to a patient’s home and assess how safe it is.

Alexandra Hospital CEO, Liak Teng Lit, said: "When the group of people come back, together with the professional staff, they will try to figure out what we must do to help these (elderly) people.

"For example, they (the elderly patients) may be eating wrongly and somebody might have to go and work with them, figure out what is it that they like to eat and teach them how to prepare the food conveniently. In other words, it’s not the specialist care, the medical care, but there’s a whole lot of other issues."
That’s why Alexandra Hospital finds that partnering community agencies is important to comprehensively address the needs of the elderly.

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