Singapore Health Award 2019

Singapore, 4 October 2019 – The Health Promotion Board (HPB) honoured 263 organisations, pre-schools and individuals for championing healthy living at the biennial Singapore HEALTH Award, a platform that distinguishes those who show a strong commitment and demonstrate commendable achievements in promoting health.

This year, the Singapore HEALTH Award was organised as a symposium which facilitated learning and sharing of best practices and exchange of views on health promotion. Themed “Sustainability of Health”, the symposium highlighted the importance of different stakeholders playing an active role in their respective settings, for Singapore to sustain its efforts in creating healthy living environments.

Promoting health in different settings

The Singapore HEALTH Award, which has traditionally been a platform to laud corporate companies for promoting health at the workplace has been expanded for the first time. Beyond companies, this year’s Award also recognised efforts by pre-schools and HPB’s Health Ambassadors, a group of volunteers who encourage the community to adopt healthier lifestyles. The expansion saw the inauguration of two new awards, the ‘Healthy Pre-school (Platinum) Award’ and the ‘Long Service Award (Health Ambassador)’.

Mr Philip Lee, Chairman of HPB said: “Singaporeans have different motivations at different life-stages. The most effective way to motivate them to lead a healthy lifestyle is by making healthy living as accessible and effortless as possible in environments where they live, learn, work and play. Broadening the scale of the Singapore HEALTH Award underscores the importance of working with different stakeholders such as companies, landlords, pre-schools and our health ambassadors to engage Singaporeans in these different settings.

“I am heartened by the exceptional efforts demonstrated by the award winners in supporting their employees, pre-schoolers and fellow Singaporeans to adopt healthier habits at workplaces, in schools and within the community. It is important that we continue to leverage such collaborative efforts with our stakeholders, to instil healthy living in Singaporeans in a meaningful, effective and sustainable way.”

The Long Service Award (Health Ambassador) was presented to four Health Ambassadors who contributed significantly to the promotion of healthy living in the community. They had fulfilled more than 100 deployment hours a year for at least four years since the start of service for the Health Ambassador Network. Their contributions included organising health-related interest groups as well as leading exercises and talks within community spaces, to equip Singaporeans with tips and knowledge on healthy living.

The Healthy Pre-school (Platinum) Award recognises pre-schools that have been accredited ‘Platinum’ consecutively for three cycles[1] under HPB’s Healthy Pre-school Accreditation Framework[2]. The award aims to encourage pre-schools to help pre-schoolers adopt healthier habits during their formative years. This is achieved through sustained efforts in providing a supportive environment to ensure that pre-schoolers have access to healthy meals and active lifestyle in school, implementing targeted interventions to help pre-schoolers maintain a healthy weight, as well as capacity-building initiatives for parents, teachers and staff members. A total of 90 pre-schools that implemented health programmes benefitting over 17,500 pre-schoolers received this award for their efforts.

With a continued focus on the health of workers, the corporate awards remained a significant component of Singapore HEALTH Award 2019. This year, 166 companies from both private and public sectors, SMEs and non-SMEs, as well as landlords and developers were recognised for their efforts in bringing health and wellness programmes to workplaces, making healthy living more accessible to half a million workers in Singapore. Six companies that stood out for their health promotion efforts were presented the Achievement Award, the highest accolade in the Corporate Award category. Besides implementing holistic workplace health programmes, these companies also demonstrated their distinction by sustaining health promoting practices for at least 10 years.

New tool being developed to help companies see benefits of workplace health

During the award presentation, HPB also shared on the beta version of a new ROI (Return on Investment) Calculator that is being developed. It is a self-help tool that will enable companies to estimate tangible outcomes from investing in the health of their employees. This is part of HPB’s strategy to help organisations estimate and quantify the value and returns of their workplace health promotion initiatives, and build more compelling business cases to encourage adoption of workplace health practices.

The ROI Calculator, currently undergoing its trials and testing, is co-developed by HPB and health economist Dr. Joanne Yoong from the University of Southern California, and it will be the first public-resource tool for workplace health investment that is localised to Singapore’s context. It is able to estimate a year-on-year rate of return from companies’ initial investment in health programmes, providing companies with the approximate returns for the next three years.

The tool is based on health economic models with several pre-set values obtained from existing literature and localised public health data. Depending on factors such as the industry, workforce size and health profile of the company as well as staff turnover costs, companies will be able to estimate returns that could result from their proposed workplace health promotion initiatives. The returns may derive from an improvement in productivity losses associated with reduced staff absenteeism and presenteeism, a decrease in staff turnover or a decline in medical claims.

About 30 companies of varying sizes across different industries had trialled the use of the ROI Calculator prototype before the beta version was shared today for companies that attended the Singapore HEALTH Award to trial online.

The ‘Symposium on Sustainability of Health: Singapore HEALTH Award 2019’ was held at the Singapore EXPO MAX Atria. The event was attended by more than 700 senior executives and health champions from Singapore’s public and private sectors, multinational companies, SMEs, pre-schools as well as health ambassadors.

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About the Health Promotion Board

The Health Promotion Board was established as a statutory board under the Ministry of Health, Singapore, in 2001 with the vision of building “A Nation of Healthy People”. The Health Promotion Board aims to empower the people of Singapore to attain optimal health, increase the quality and years of healthy life and prevent illness, disability and premature death. As the key agency overseeing national health promotion and disease prevention programmes, HPB spearheads health education, promotion and prevention programmes as well as creates a health-supportive environment in Singapore. It develops and organises relevant health promotion and disease prevention programmes, reaching out to the healthy, the at-risk and the unhealthy at all stages of life – children, youths, adults and older Singapore residents. Its health promotion programmes include nutrition, mental health, physical activity, smoking control and communicable disease education. HPB also promotes healthy ageing, integrated health screening, and chronic disease education and management.

More information can be found at www.hpb.gov.sg.

[1] FY2015, 2016 and 2018

[2] The Healthy Pre-school Accreditation Framework is a two-tiered (Basic and Platinum) framework that provides a structured approach to support and empower pre-schools to develop a culture that promotes healthy living from young.

Media Release

For more information on the article above, refer to Singapore Health Award 2019 [PDF, 541 KB].