Reflective Writing

In this ever-changing society, healthcare plays a major role in rendering medical assistance at community and national level when natural disaster and health crisis occurs. According to World Health Organization (2009), nurses and midwives are important in the global healthcare workforce as they have a part in delivering care to primary, acute and community settings. Recently in Singapore, there have been debates suggesting to make nursing as a national service for all females for the purpose of solving nursing shortage issue due to the possibility of reduction of foreign nurses joining the healthcare sector. It is essential to have a group of local nurses who are "operationally ready" in order to be activated in mass casualty situations (Ng, 2012). In several restructured hospitals in Singapore, there are nurses trained with essential skills to handle emergency situations as well as to provide safe and quality care (Singapore General Hospital, 2010). With adequate trainings and education, nurses are able to heighten their knowledge as well as be critical thinkers so as to provide holistic care to a diverse patient population.

According to Ministry of Health's statistics (2012b), there was an increase of nursing graduates from 1347 to 1542 between the year 2008 to 2010 respectively. In addition, Tan-Kuick and Ng (2010) claimed that there was a need to increase the number of education institutions in the year 2005 and 2008 for the purpose of producing more competently trained nurses. This showed that the Singapore government had been making an effort to increase the number of skilled workers to solve the issue of nursing shortage due to greying population and the rising trend of complicated chronic illnesses. However, it was also stated that it seemed there were sufficient local graduates to meet the demand and the retention rate is still remaining low (Lim, 2005). On the contrary, another statistics from Ministry of Health (2012a) showed that there was an