SINGAPORE - More patients have been receiving hospital-level care in their homes since the nationwide Mobile Inpatient Care @ Home programme (MIC@Home) has progressively expanded to those who had not been admitted into hospitals.

These patients include those who were referred to the programme through private general practitioners (GPs), polyclinics, community care teams, and nursing homes.

When the Ministry of Health (MOH) officially launched MIC@Home in 2022 after earlier pilots, the programme was for patients who were recovering after hospital stays, to ease the demand for hospital beds.

On Oct 3, the National University Health System (NUHS) announced that its version of the programme, called NUHS@Home, has cared for nearly 7,000 patients at home to date, and saved over 42,000 hospital bed days.

NUHS, a public healthcare cluster looking after the population in the west, piloted NUHS@Home in September 2020.

At the fifth anniversary celebrations of NUHS@Home, it said it has progressively expanded the programme since 2024. Up to end-August, it has cared for about 200 patients referred through the community touchpoints – 56 from NTUC Health’s nursing homes, 64 from NUHS’ community care teams, and the rest from polyclinics or GPs.

These patients had conditions such as pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and cellulitis, which commonly affect older adults with limited mobility.

They would otherwise have had to be admitted to an acute hospital, adding to the demand for hospital beds.

Apart from NUHS, the other two public healthcare clusters in Singapore have also implemented the home care programme.

SingHealth, which takes care of the population in the east, similarly provides home-based care to patients who were not admitted to their hospitals, and are working on extending services to more patients.

Professor Lee Chien Earn, deputy group CEO of SingHealth, told The Straits Times the cluster has been accepting referrals for...