Reflection - healthcare issue

Taking time to reflect how our CoP has come thus far, we would like to thank you all again for spending time to think about our discussion topics and contributing value to this blog. Whether it's a mere 2-cents' worth of personal opinions, references to what others have said or honest insights into the industry, it's nothing short of creating value for our project. Your input reflect the breadth of knowledge and depth of thought.

Many times in our posts, we have centered our conversations around the issue of caregiving and put focus on what the voices of the communities are saying. Saying to policy makers, opinion leaders of the industry, researchers, health service providers. In a handful of comments, we sense passion in your beliefs, we see revelation of the health sector.

I was watching tonight's documentary on the phenomenon of depression in the Singapore society, Channel 8's 无忧无郁 and for moments of the enactment of a depressed caregiver tending to her elderly mother and her emotional breakdown, I can almost identify with the trials she goes through, save for, maybe, the suicidal tendencies. And it dawned even more heavily on me (aside from the fact that this series on depression is shown) that as a people, each of us is experiencing some extent, some form of depression. In each of our very own right, we are.

The issue of health care is not merely a national concern taxonomized into the areas of medical research, caregiving, hospitals, medical ethics, epidemics and so forth, it complicatedly involves the society we're in. We are, but a stressed nation and each of us is a participant of the health sector. There's no avoiding this.

It is an unsettled community, perpetually never at rest for fear of contracting H1N1, for fear of being quarantined for long and losing our jobs, for worrying over our babies and geriatric members of the family, for rising medical costs, for deficiencies of national health insurance system our cases fall into, for seeing an unethical GP.

For a population that has increased exponentially in the past one year, for an alarmingly overburdened economically active population of this society, for limited and affordable medical facilities catered to the average Singaporean... each sub-issue under the arc of 'health care' never stands alone, and when we try to contemplate or when the government strives to tackle its problems, we ought to take into account our very social fabric, the availability and accessibility of medical technologies, the affordability of hospital facilities, the psychological experience of our loved ones as patients, the planning of a household for the future, the mental fortitude of a caregiver in tough times, the social network of friends and relatives leveraged for support and help.

The health sector is more than dynamic, it's more than what an academic journal can critique; it's intertwined with so many issues at hand. It should be viewed in the larger context of population control and management, the politics that defy change and curb grassroots voices, national funds, the social and private environments we live in. Each issue should never be siphoned off and taken separately from the larger webs of context the issue is embedded in.

When you embrace one, you embrace all the baggage that comes with it.