Singaporeans and foreigners worked side by side to overcome the crisis.
In 2003, almost one in three nurses at Tan Tock Seng Hospital – or 430 out of 1,500 nursing staff – was a foreigner, from countries like China, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. During Sars, they stood shoulder to shoulder with Singaporeans in the battlefront.
There was staff nurse Yu Liang, 29, from China, who worked in the Sars Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Ward 6B and faced the weak and dying days on end. She saw colleagues fall to the virus. She saw patients who had come in healthy and lucid become weak and unconscious under sedation.
She recalled: “We tried our best for every Sars patient. Even when a patient collapsed and we knew there might be a poor outcome, we would try to resuscitate them till the very last second. We did everything for them and we tried all means.
“We never gave up and we tried harder than we would under normal circumstances,” she said through tears.
Staff nurse Katherine Javier, 22, who got Sars from nursing the first Sars patient, came from the Philippines.
When she recovered, she asked to be transferred to the Sars ward, figuring that since she had recovered, she might have developed some immunity to the disease – and empathy with Sars patients.
Her supervisors turned down her request, saying moving healthcare workers who had been exposed to other wards increased the risk of an outbreak. So, she was assigned to another ward.
There, she found just three patients in the 38-bed ward being cared for by eight healthcare workers. The hospital had closed its doors to non-Sars patients, so no new cases were coming to the ward. The remaining patients were non-Sars patients who could not yet be discharged.
They needed not only nursing care, but also a lot of companionship since no visitors were allowed. “We had the added role of trying to be their family. We would give them things and try to talk to them, but a lot of them told us to go away and said they just wanted their family,” she said.
TTSH’s director of nursing Kwek Puay Ee said: “We had calls from some parents who were worried and did not want their daughters to come to work. It was especially difficult for the families of foreign workers who were far away and unsure of what was going on here.
“The beauty of it was that everyone worked as one team. We all worked together and nobody felt that there was a difference between being a foreigner or a local.”
Mr Christopher Andaya, a Filipino healthcare assistant, was among the SGH staff moved to TTSH to take care of the SGH patients being transferred there. He recalled the fear and uncertainty when the nurses and healthcare workers first realized they had been nursing people who later fell ill with Sars. “We were nursing the suspected Sars patients and so were the ones who had the most close-up contact with them. We served them their diets, changed their clothes for them and changed their bedpans. We were the most vulnerable to the disease,” he said.
After the move, Mr Andaya’s duties remained much the same, except that “very strict infection-control procedures” had to be adhered to. He also took on portering duties, as there was a shortage of manpower.
“In the morning, I had to sponge the patients and serve the diets. Before going into each cubicle, I had to wear my goggles, gown, gloves and mask. After the first bed, I had to change out of my gown and gloves before I went on to the next patient and so on,” Mr Andaya said.
The healthcare workers also had to check their temperatures thrice each shift.
His family in the Philippines told him: Come home, you’ll be much safer here. “But I told them that I had volunteered to be a nurse, so I had to think of all the patients. I reassured them that nothing was happening to me and the hospital was taking very good care of us, so they should be calm.”
Although he was a foreigner, he never thought about quitting his job or the country that gave him a livelihood. He was not the only one.
Many foreigners – from Malaysia, the Philippines and China – in the healthcare sector joined in the fight against Sars. In the laboratories, Indian, Chinese and American nationals worked alongside Singaporeans.
The uplifting moments for Mr Andaya came when, one by one, the patients were discharged. “They’d say: ‘Thank you for taking care of us, for not leaving us and letting us go even though we were Sars patients.’ And I’d say: ‘It’s our job, uncle and auntie.’”
This story is adapted from the book A Defining Moment: How Singapore Beat SARS by Chua Mui Hoong (Institute of Policy Studies, 2004). Text copyright: Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts. Used with permission of MICA.
In 2003, almost one in three nurses at Tan Tock Seng Hospital – or 430 out of 1,500 nursing staff – was a foreigner, from countries like China, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. During Sars, they stood shoulder to shoulder with Singaporeans in the battlefront.
There was staff nurse Yu Liang, 29, from China, who worked in the Sars Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Ward 6B and faced the weak and dying days on end. She saw colleagues fall to the virus. She saw patients who had come in healthy and lucid become weak and unconscious under sedation.
She recalled: “We tried our best for every Sars patient. Even when a patient collapsed and we knew there might be a poor outcome, we would try to resuscitate them till the very last second. We did everything for them and we tried all means.
“We never gave up and we tried harder than we would under normal circumstances,” she said through tears.
Staff nurse Katherine Javier, 22, who got Sars from nursing the first Sars patient, came from the Philippines.
When she recovered, she asked to be transferred to the Sars ward, figuring that since she had recovered, she might have developed some immunity to the disease – and empathy with Sars patients.
Her supervisors turned down her request, saying moving healthcare workers who had been exposed to other wards increased the risk of an outbreak. So, she was assigned to another ward.
There, she found just three patients in the 38-bed ward being cared for by eight healthcare workers. The hospital had closed its doors to non-Sars patients, so no new cases were coming to the ward. The remaining patients were non-Sars patients who could not yet be discharged.
They needed not only nursing care, but also a lot of companionship since no visitors were allowed. “We had the added role of trying to be their family. We would give them things and try to talk to them, but a lot of them told us to go away and said they just wanted their family,” she said.
TTSH’s director of nursing Kwek Puay Ee said: “We had calls from some parents who were worried and did not want their daughters to come to work. It was especially difficult for the families of foreign workers who were far away and unsure of what was going on here.
“The beauty of it was that everyone worked as one team. We all worked together and nobody felt that there was a difference between being a foreigner or a local.”
Mr Christopher Andaya, a Filipino healthcare assistant, was among the SGH staff moved to TTSH to take care of the SGH patients being transferred there. He recalled the fear and uncertainty when the nurses and healthcare workers first realized they had been nursing people who later fell ill with Sars. “We were nursing the suspected Sars patients and so were the ones who had the most close-up contact with them. We served them their diets, changed their clothes for them and changed their bedpans. We were the most vulnerable to the disease,” he said.
After the move, Mr Andaya’s duties remained much the same, except that “very strict infection-control procedures” had to be adhered to. He also took on portering duties, as there was a shortage of manpower.
“In the morning, I had to sponge the patients and serve the diets. Before going into each cubicle, I had to wear my goggles, gown, gloves and mask. After the first bed, I had to change out of my gown and gloves before I went on to the next patient and so on,” Mr Andaya said.
The healthcare workers also had to check their temperatures thrice each shift.
His family in the Philippines told him: Come home, you’ll be much safer here. “But I told them that I had volunteered to be a nurse, so I had to think of all the patients. I reassured them that nothing was happening to me and the hospital was taking very good care of us, so they should be calm.”
Although he was a foreigner, he never thought about quitting his job or the country that gave him a livelihood. He was not the only one.
Many foreigners – from Malaysia, the Philippines and China – in the healthcare sector joined in the fight against Sars. In the laboratories, Indian, Chinese and American nationals worked alongside Singaporeans.
The uplifting moments for Mr Andaya came when, one by one, the patients were discharged. “They’d say: ‘Thank you for taking care of us, for not leaving us and letting us go even though we were Sars patients.’ And I’d say: ‘It’s our job, uncle and auntie.’”
This story is adapted from the book A Defining Moment: How Singapore Beat SARS by Chua Mui Hoong (Institute of Policy Studies, 2004). Text copyright: Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts. Used with permission of MICA.
