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Consensus statement on Singapore perinatal mental health guidelines on depression and anxiety

Perinatal mental health conditions have been recognised as a key area of focus by the World Health Organization, with the new guide published in...

Development and validation of a new self-assessment tool to measure professionalism among medical students

Professionalism is a concept that is difficult to define, but in relation to medical practice, it can be summarised as values, behaviours and conduct...

Perinatal mental health in Singapore: Implementation opportunities and relevance of gender-carer roles in screening

In this issue of the Annals, the consensus statement on perinatal mental health by Chen et al. covers the handling of depression and anxiety...

Nurturing professional behaviours and ethical practice: From students to professionals

Medical professionalism refers to the set of values, behaviours, and ethical principles that guide the conduct of medical professionals in their interactions with patients,...

Impact of pre-existing depression on severe COVID-19 outcomes

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in 2019 had rapidly developed into a global pandemic, causing more than 6.8 million deaths and impacting the...

Script concordance test to assess diagnostic and management reasoning in acute medicine

Dear Editor,  Clinical reasoning, an essential skill for patient care, can be difficult to assess. We created and validated a script concordance test (SCT) to...

Leveraging ChatGPT to aid patient education on coronary angiogram

Natural-language artificial intelligence (AI) is a promising technological advancement poised to revolutionise the delivery of healthcare.1 Traditionally, inclusion of technology in the augmentation of...

Healthcare worker job burnout, anxiety and depression: A one-year comparison during COVID-19 in Singapore

Dear Editor, The mental health of our healthcare workforce has never been as scrutinised as it has the last three years since the COVID-19 pandemic....

Risk and protective factors of mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional study in Singapore

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted people’s well-being globally.1 Individuals faced several stressors during the pandemic, including fear of contracting the disease, experiencing severe...

Impact of COVID-19 on mental health and social service provision in Singapore: Learnings from a descriptive mixed-methods study for future resource planning

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization in January 2020.1 Singapore reported its first case of...

Impact of COVID-19 on mental health and healthcare service delivery

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed more than 6.8 million lives globally.2 While there is yet a cure for the disease, vaccines are now available...

Self-esteem and positive body image to overcome female sexual dysfunction

Human sexuality is arguably one of the main pillars of health, like nutrition and sleep. Improvements in diagnostic and therapeutic biotechnologies have enabled focus...

Reducing non-clinical working hours of junior doctors could benefit patient outcomes

Dear Editor, An 80-hour duty limit for residents was first introduced by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in 2003, with the...

Exploring loss and grief during the COVID-19 pandemic: A scoping review of qualitative studies

As of mid October 2022, the World Health Organization recorded that more than 620 million people worldwide have been infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus...

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on loss and grief

As of 17 October 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed more than 6.5 million lives globally, with 1,639 deaths reported in Singapore.1 With numerous...

Employers’ attitudes towards employing people with mental health conditions

Dear Editor, The advantages of employment for young people with mental health conditions (PMHC) are well known and documented,1 but many remain unemployed. Besides offering...

Teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives of medical students in Singapore

Dear Editor, The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in many changes to medical education, including the site and mode of teaching, conducting of...

Screening for somatisation in an Asian children’s hospital emergency setting

Dear Editor, In recent years, self-harm is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality among adolescents in Singapore.1,2 This is just the tip of the...

Prevalence of burnout among healthcare professionals in Singapore

Burnout was first described in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, where he discussed the concept based on physical signs, behavioural indicators, judgment, emotional factors, and...

Bridging electroconvulsive therapy in schizophrenia with cognition and quality of life

Schizophrenia is one of the most debilitating severe mental illnesses with significant impact,1 irrespective of culture or socioeconomic class.2 Over the decades, antipsychotic medication...

Prevalence and correlates of psychological distress and coronavirus anxiety among hospital essential services workers in Singapore

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected almost all geographies in the world since 2020. Many countries have imposed strict isolation measures to contain...

Theory and Practice in Continuing Medical Education

A physician’s education in medical science represents a continuum of several interrelated phases. It starts with medical school, passes through brief housemanship year, and...

The moderating effect of employment status on the relationship between lifetime major depressive disorder and positive mental health

Studies across the world have reported a high prevalence of mental disorders,1-3 highlighting that mental disorders remain one of the major causes of “non-fatal...

The relationship between major depressive disorder and employment status

Major depressive disorder is associated with executive dysfunction that includes impairment in problem-solving and decision-making,1 as well as with occupational impairment.2 One of the...

Quality Assurance of Problem-based Learning (PBL): The Hong Kong Experience

The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) was established in 1887 and its curriculum has been run in a traditional...

Clinical Reasoning Learning Sessions

Many medical schools worldwide have made the shift toward problem-based learning (PBL) medical education. Some of them employ these new techniques in only part...

Is Problem-Based Learning a Quality Approach to Education in Health Sciences?

Since the pioneering adoption of problem-based learning (PBL) by McMaster University in medical education more than three decades ago, increasingly more medical schools around...

Stress among emergency medicine residents during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study

Dear Editor, The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted medical education1,2 and distressed clinicians.3,4 Understanding the impact of this pandemic on emergency medicine (EM) residents’ experience of...

Book Review

These are challenging times for medical schools as the frontiers of knowledge have expanded enormously and rapidly in recent years. In order to keep...

A Problem-Based Learning Pathway for Medical Students: Improving the Process Through Action Research

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centred, self-directed, integrated and contextual mode of learning. It has been widely perceived by many to confer advantages in...

Curriculum TIPS For All of Us

Medical education is a lifelong learning process. Just as we remind our students and ourselves that the practice of medicine is a lifelong process...

Facilitation of Students’ Discussion in Problem-based Learning Tutorials to Create Mechanisms: The Use of Five Key Questions

An important aspect of problem-based learning (PBL), particularly in the early years of the undergraduate medical, physiotherapy, nursing and dental courses, is teaching basic...

What do You Mean by “Satisfactory”?

There were 2 questions which initiated this research. One became the title of this paper; the other was a concern that the integration of...

Towards a Global Educational Matrix for Tomorrow’s Health Systems

Society supports medical schools expecting them to produce physicians who can improve both the health of the population as well as the health system...

A Survey of Medical Students’ Perceptions of the Quality of their Medical Education upon Graduation

Founded in 1934, Tehran University of Medical Sciences School of Medicine (TUMS-SoM) is the oldest modern medical school in Iran. It has the most...

Innovative “Case-Based Integrated Teaching” in an Undergraduate Medical Curriculum: Development and Teachers’ and Students’ Responses

In Asia, the challenges facing medical education are similar across different countries. The learning process is still problematic with large classes, and most of...

The Future of Medical Education: The Second 100 Years

This is a proud year for the medical profession in Singapore, as we celebrate 100 years of medical education. As the oldest faculty in...

The NUS MBBS-PhD Programme: Nurturing Clinician-Scientists for Tomorrow

The MBBS-PhD programme is a significant milestone in medical education in Singapore. In July 2000, the Faculty of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS)...

The Medical Students’ Societies and Medical Students’ Publications

For a very long time, King Edward VII (endearingly abbreviated “KE”) was synonymous with the medical school and its associated hall of residence. The...

A Century of Medical Students’ Activities (Medical College Union/Medical Society)

On 3 July 1905, the Straits and Federated Malay States Government Medical School was started with the objective of training the local men and...

The First Graduates in 1910

The Medical School in Singapore was founded on 3 July 1905; it was named the Straits and Federated Malay States Government Medical School. It...

Milestones of the Medical School and Medical Progress of Singapore over the Past 100 years

1905: The Medical School started off in an old female lunatic asylum on the site of the general hospital at Sepoy Lines.1 Called the...

The Founding of the Medical School in Singapore in 1905

The King Edward VII College of Medicine, Singapore, was founded in 1905, and produced its first graduates in 1910. Its diploma of Licentiate in...

Self-directed Learning in Health Professions Education

More than 600,000 new citations were published in MEDLINE in 2005; this raised the total number of indexed citations to more than 14 million...

Translating the Family Medicine Vision into Educational Programmes in Singapore

The core of the Family Medicine (FM) vision is patient-centred care, requiring specific education and vocational training. Modern day FM began its existence as...

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: Approaches to Teaching and Assessing Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics in a Problem-based Learning Course

Over the last 3 decades, the rate of knowledge accumulation in drug development has been enhanced by advances in molecular modelling, the molecular genetics...

The Association Between Parental Socioeconomic Status (SES) and Medical Students’ Personal and Professional Development

In order to commit to their mission and placement requirement efficiently and effectively, policy-makers need to decide which types of students their training units...

Impact of Various Continuing Medical Education Activities on Clinical Practice – A Survey of Malaysian Doctors on its Perceived Importance

Continuing medical education (CME) plays an indispensable role in the clinical practice of any doctor. The practice of evidence-based medicine today,1 or any meaningful...

The personal recovery movement in Singapore – past, present and future

Early psychiatric conceptions of successful mental health recovery traditionally focused on reducing or eradicating symptoms.1 The personal recovery movement of the early 1990s in...

Characteristics of Medical School Graduates who Underwent Problem-Based Learning

Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of the medical education strategies to promote continuous active and self-directed learning.1,2 Our medical school implemented PBL in 1990...

The Challenges of “Continuing Medical Education” in a Pandemic Era

Although pandemics of influenza have occurred (albeit rarely, i.e. once every few decades) for more than 3 centuries, recent outbreaks of H1N1 and H5N1...

The Pedagogical Value of a Student-run Community-based Experiential Learning Project: The Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine Public Health Screening

Experiential learning brings medical students out of the comfort zone of learning in their classrooms to acquire and apply knowledge and skills in an...

Research on Psychoneuroimmunology: Does Stress Influence Immunity and Cause Coronary Artery Disease?

In recent decades, there has been increasing interest in exploring the relationship between psychological stress and various health conditions. An enlarging body of evidence...

The Health-Related Quality of Life of Junior Doctors

It is widely reported that junior doctors experience a large amount of work-related stress and fatigue. This has detrimental effects both on the well-being...

Suicidal Ideation in Medical Students: Who Is at Risk?

It has long been acknowledged that medical students are at a greater risk for depression, but their elevated risk for suicide is particularly alarming....

Where do People with Mental Disorders in Singapore go to for Help?

Not only are mental disorders prevalent in any country, it is also common that many of those with mental disorders are neither seeking nor...

Two Strategies to Intensify Evidence-based Medicine Education of Undergraduate Students: A Randomised Controlled Tria

Knowledge and skills of evidence-based medicine (EBM) can be taught by many methods, such as role modeling evidence-based care, using evidence for clinical medicine...

Validation of the Paediatric Hearing Impairment Caregiver Experience (PHICE) Questionnaire

The stress experienced by parents of children with hearing impairment (HI) has been studied over the past 2 decades. Increased parenting stress is often...

Mentorship in Academic Medicine: A Catalyst of Talents

The field of medicine is complex. Its interwoven structure of clinical practice, medical education and biomedical research, coupled with intricacies of the health system,...

Academic Medicine Education Institute (AM∙EI): Transforming the Educational Culture of Health Professionals

In 2010, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) and Singapore Healthcare Services (SingHealth) launched an initiative to improve the lives of patients by combining their...

“Are Medical Students’ Views of an Ideal Physician Eroding? A Study on Perceived Qualities of a “Role Model” Doctor Before and After Housemanship and between Two Cohorts Five Years Apart “

Role modeling has been reported as an increasingly prominent teaching need and strategy in the field of medical education. This aspect of training helps...

Laparoscopic liver resection: Global diffusion and learning curve

Laparoscopic liver resection (LLR) is being utilised with increasing frequency worldwide, as initial concerns about the safety and feasibility of LLR, such as the...

Prehabilitation and Its Role in Geriatric Surgery

The population in Singapore is ageing rapidly. According to statistics, by 2030, 1 in 2 adults in Singapore will be >65 years old. As...

Impact of unemployment on mental disorders, physical health and quality of life: Findings from the Singapore Mental Health Study

Several reviews and meta-analyses have established an association between unemployment and psychological distress. This relationship between unemployment and mental health is complex and likely...

Dietary intake of persons with depressive and psychotic disorders in Singapore

Unhealthy diet is a modifiable risk factor in many health conditions, including mental disorders. Nutritional psychiatry is an emerging field that examines the role...

Stress and resilience of paediatric healthcare workers during COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused multiple changes in healthcare systems as governments implement measures to boost acute services. Healthcare workers (HCWs)...

Impact of COVID-19 on mental health and occupational burnout in a surgical unit in Singapore

In this study, we assessed the impact of COVID-19 on the psychological well-being and burnout among staff who manage critically ill general surgery and...

Psychosocial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on paediatric healthcare workers

Early studies done in China during this COVID-19 pandemic have shown considerable mental health impact on healthcare workers (HCWs), especially those working on the...

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global mental health: From the general public to healthcare workers

The COVID-19 pandemic began in late 2019 and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. To decrease...

Autism Spectrum Disorder and COVID-19: Helping Caregivers Navigate the Pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has disrupted societies globally. As of 11 May 2020, 53 children have been infected with COVID-19 in Singapore...

Mental Health Strategies to Combat the Psychological Impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Beyond Paranoia and Panic

On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) an international public health emergency after the...