Speech by Minister Khaw Boon Wan at the Land Transport Excellence Awards 2019

My friends

1.     I am back! But for tonight, please don’t hug me! My bones are not joined up yet. That will take several more weeks. But at least there is a piece of titanium plate there now with six screws, so the bones are well aligned. I’ve just got to let time solve the problem and get the bones fused together.

2.     Thank you all for keeping the trains and the buses running. Though hospitalised, I kept myself updated on your progress. So I knew about the glitches on the Circle Line and the East-West Line and was relieved to know that prompt recovery action helped to mitigate the impact on our commuters. And of course the glitches remind us that we are not yet perfect, and that we have to work harder and smarter. But our MRT system today is far more reliable than it was in 2017. We have turned the corner and I want to thank all of you for making this happen, including the many colleagues working in the trenches day and night.

Drawing Parallels to our Healthcare Sector

3.     My recent hospitalisation was my fifth hospitalisation. Over the years, my personal hospital experience allowed me to observe first-hand the continuous and significant improvements in our healthcare services. Our doctors, nurses, allied health workers, they are truly world-class. Their capabilities and skills are both broad and deep. These are capabilities built up painstakingly and systematically, not just overnight.

4.     One key strategy we adopted to build up the healthcare sector’s capabilities was HMDP – the Health Manpower Development Programme. In my early years, when I was in Ministry of Health, I was involved in its development and expansion over the decades and I am glad to observe the fruits of our investments. First, we sent our young colleagues to the best medical centres in the world, to pick up the latest subspecialty skills and capabilities. Second, we expanded the programme to nurses and then the allied health workers. Third, as our consultants developed their own insights and pioneered new techniques, we began to see a role reversal, as foreign doctors and nurses come here to pick up the latest skills. Fourth, as we invested more consistently in medical research and translational medicine, we began to develop and patent new medical devices, and innovative solutions, including some drugs, to help push the frontiers of Medicine.

5.     As a result, Singapore Medicine and our public hospitals are now at the cutting edge of Medicine, enabling subsidised patients access to the best of specialists and subspecialists. Most countries would have top hospitals but they are often private hospitals which most patients there are unable to afford. Singapore, we are unique, in that our public hospitals are able to provide the best in class to all Singaporeans through the 3Ms financing model: MediSave, MediShield and MediFund. I am happy to note that our achievements have been recognised and recently Singapore General Hospital was ranked the third-best hospital in the world by Newsweek magazine.

Emulating the Healthcare Sector’s Success 

6.     What we have achieved in healthcare, we can try to emulate in public transport – building a world-class public transport system benefitting all Singaporeans. This requires a clear, multi-year strategy of consistent investment in capabilities and skills development, to support industry transformation. We are not starting from zero. Over the years, transport has seen its share of transformation. I am mindful that transformation can be unsettling and stressful to our public transport workers. But by and large, they have risen to the challenge, and I applaud them!

7.     To succeed in industry transformation, it is my strong belief that we need to forge a strong “One Team” spirit between Government, regulator, and private operators. While we play different roles and serve different masters, we must be aligned on the mission and the core purpose of our work. And it is to help commuters move from point A to point B safely, comfortably, no hassle. This “One Team” spirit, I think, has been the key factor behind the successful improvement in rail reliability in recent years. The same “One Team” spirit will remain important going forward.

Conclusion

8.     On this note, let me congratulate the winners of today’s Land Transport Excellence Awards. In particular, I want to commend the North East Line for being the most reliable MRT line in Singapore, crossing 1 million train-km MKBF last year. When I set a stretch target for the industry a few years ago, I asked for MKBF data of the major MRT operators in the world and I decided on 1 million train-km. In fact I started out with 800,000 train-km but raised it to 1 million train-km because very few MRT operators in the world could consistently cross 1 million train-km. I set it, I mean, politically, we always take the approach – underpromise so that you can overperform. It makes a lot of political sense. But when our MRT industry was in pretty poor shape, I decided that you needed something bold, something ambitious, something seemingly impossible, so that even if you can’t achieve it, if you can achieve 90, 80 per cent of it, 70 per cent of it, it would have been a big achievement. And importantly, we will be able to motivate our staff. And that is how the 1 million train-km target was set. I didn’t quite believe that we will make it – but we made it! Congratulations, North East Line!

9.     I am especially pleased and satisfied with the North-South Line. This is the line, the oldest line, 30 years old, gave us plenty of trouble because being old like my old bones, if you don’t fix it properly, every morning it will give you trouble. But they were able to make a more than ten-fold improvement in their MKBF from 89,000, that means not even 100,000 train-km in 2017, to nearly 900,000 train-km last year. And this year, I expect this line, together with all the other lines, to continue to make further progress compared to last year. I think this is the same spirit that we goad each other on, encourage each other on. So it is not a chasing of figures, but more to encourage each other, to inspire each other that this can be done. This is not rocket science, you just have to be consistent in the work that you do, focus on what is necessary, and at the same time building up capabilities, training up the entire workforce. That’s how we set up the Rail Academy, to continue to improve on this. Because we cannot always be doing the same thing, because technology keeps on changing and progressing. In public transport, especially in trains, there is constant change and transformation. Digitalisation, for example, opens up huge opportunities. But it does mean that capabilities have to be picked up. I think we started out where civil engineering was very important in trains, but now increasingly it is electrical, it is electronic engineering, and increasingly data, how data science, and how do you make use of data so that you can work even smarter.

10.    Thank you very much, and enjoy the dinner.