Singapore General Hospital to move closer to MRT stations
MRT commuters can expect a shorter walk to the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) in the future. The hospital will be re-located closer to the two train stations along Outram Road and Eu Tong Sen Street.
"We will move the high patient-volume services closer to the Outram Park MRT Station and link up the hospital with the station, so that you can get off the MRT and take an easy walk to your place of care," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday.
He added that roads will also be redesigned to allow ambulances and patients faster access to the accident and emergency department.
The amount of space devoted to patient care at the Outram campus will also triple over the next 20 years, according to the masterplan unveiled by Mr Lee.
Next on the cards is the 550-bed Outram Community Hospital, slated to open in 2020.
Also opening within the next decade are the new National Cancer Centre Building and an interim accident and emergency building, which will be used until the whole hospital moves to its new premises.
The number of patients has more than doubled from the time the current emergency building was built almost 40 years ago. One of the busiest departments in the hospital, it treated more than 135,000 patients last year.
Part of the new SGH complex will also come up within the next 10 years.
NEW DENTAL CENTRE
It will house the new dental centre and an elective care centre for non-emergency treatments. It will have operating theatres, specialist outpatient clinics and wards for patients who need to be hospitalised.
Under the next phase of development, the current cancer centre, the old pathology laboratories and some carparks will make way for the new SGH complex, which should be ready in about 20 years' time.
The masterplan, which takes in 43 ha of land, will also include a research park for companies that work closely with healthcare providers and an education zone where Duke-NUS Medical School is located.
Noting how far SGH has developed, Mr Lee said: "In the old days, we had open wards and there were long corridors linking up different parts of the hospitals. Because many patients were illiterate and could not read signs, lines in different colours were painted on the ground.
"So if you needed to get to a particular clinic, the nurse would tell you, 'Follow the blue line!' Hopefully you reached the right place!"
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