Building strategy together: Changi General Hospital’s approach to developing patient-centred strategic focus areas in Singapore

Background: Changi General Hospital (CGH), like many other tertiary-care centres in Singapore, face evolving challenges of aligning operational, strategic, and population health goals within an integrated care system transformation. This requires a structured yet agile approach to hospital strategy formulation, identification of key priority areas for action, and supporting hospital-based care delivery with community care strategies.

 

Approach: CGH’s Senior Management and Corporate Planning team adopted participatory public health engagement principles, integrating inclusive stakeholder engagement, iterative process mapping, and robust strategy alignment with the broader SingHealth cluster vision.

Additionally, CGH took a hospital-wide approach with engagements across operations, finance, human resources, corporate communications, clinical staff – to complement proactive change management methodologies via structured facilitation, staff engagement sessions.

 

This helped achieve a cohesive direction that emphasises organisational resilience, and foster ownership at all levels. By highlighting adaptability, collaborative leadership, and continuous feedback loops, the Corporate Planning team facilitated conversations on various workstream priorities to ensure CGH effectively addresses evolving health system challenges.

 

Key activities by Corporate Planning to achieve CGH Senior Management’s mandate include: (i) Annual strategic planning retreats bringing together leaders and stakeholders to advance strategic focus areas, (ii) encouraging a “marketplace of ideas” via support for programs (both clinical and workflow-based) that will enhance the hospital’s patient care goals, (iii) leading staff engagements via townhalls and dialogues, (iv) managing CGH’s relationship with other international partners to improve the hospital’s strategic presence thus building a ‘centre for excellence’. Tapping on these key factors allowed CGH to address complex problems and leverage the national healthcare transformation momentum.

 

Results:Through cycles of strategy iteration at annual retreats and Senior Management meetings, CGH achieved internal consensus building on priority strategic focus areas, and synergistic alignment with the SingHealth cluster’s (i) appropriate and value-based care, and (ii) academic health centre vision.

 

CGH has launched multiple initiatives and care model transformation that is not merely ‘clinician-led’ but ‘hospital-led’ which will empower patients, and advance clinical best practices, translational research, and teaching. CGH’s enablers of (i) digital tools, (ii) system sustainability, (iii) workforce psychological safety – ensures that both internal staff (our people) and patients are uniformly cared for.

 

Implications: CGH’s strategy development process demonstrates the value of (i) robust system-wide frameworks, and (ii) stakeholder co-design in driving integrated care transformation. Such approach may be adapted in other healthcare systems: combining top-down strategic alignment with bottom-up stakeholder co-design to foster sustainable, people-centred care.