Innovating for future health

It is a great honour to be given this opportunity to be the Singapore Medical Association (SMA) Lecturer this year. When I started thinking about the lecture topic, I did some research on SMA. One of the documents I came across was an SMA 40th anniversary publication in the April 1999 edition of the Singapore Medical Journal (SMJ), and one of the articles, ‘Conversation with Past Presidents’, caught my eye. In the article, SMA’s past presidents were recalling SMA’s relationship with the Ministry of Health (MOH), Singapore, and the government. Dr Choo Jim Eng recalled that “it was the experience then [1970s] that the Guest of Honour at SMA functions would give the profession a pasting”, while Dr NK Yong said that, in the ’80s, “SMA functions were looked upon by MOH with some suspicion”.(1)