Helping the elderly find their way in Singapore General Hospital is meaningful volunteer work

A funny thing happens on the way to the Singapore General Hospital while I am on my way there to do a shift as a guide. I lose my way.

“Please take public transport,” the hospital’s website says, citing the narrow lanes between buildings and the lack of parking lots. This is well and good, as long as you know how to get to where you are going.

On the walk from the Outram MRT station to the hospital to report for duty, the buildings begin to look the same and the signs seem to point to thin air.

A staff member rescues me from the maze. The hospital campus comprises a dozen or so buildings scattered in a seemingly random pattern atop a hill, served by roughly the same number of taxi stands and shuttle bus pickup points.

I am in the hospital to do the very thing that the stranger did for me – to help others navigate this concrete rabbit warren and make their hospital visit, already an unhappy experience, a little less frustrating.

Ms Mumtaj Ibrahim, assistant manager in the Community Relations Department, tells me that I am stationed near the entrance to the Specialist Outpatient Clinics in Block 3. This is a high-traffic area, where one in three of the 3,000 or so patients who come through the door is elderly, perhaps in need of walking assistance and help finding their way.

“It’s packed like Orchard Road on a Saturday. It’s chaotic but there is order in the chaos,” says Ms Mumtaj, who is in her 30s. Our job is to be part of that order.

At breakfast at a cafe near the entrance, I observe the 8.30am swarm and agree to the statement that “crowded” and “elderly” are not two words that go well together.

Block 3’s Specialist Outpatient Clinic area is where I can help for one shift as a guide, joining the 35 volunteers who take at least one shift a week there, helping to put the lost on the right path and taking them by wheelchair, should they need one.

The Guider’s Programme is part of the Friends of SGH volunteer plan, which has been running since 1993. Until the formation of the Guiders, volunteers mainly operated the fund-raising retail cart, the bedside arts and crafts programme and entertained patients with live musical performances.

I am joining the morning shift, which runs from 9am to 1pm (the later shift runs from 1 to 5pm). The guides are mostly women who are retired, housewives or working freelance.

After a few minutes picking up the basics of wheelchair operation and the importance of frequent hand cleansing, I don the big blue Friend of SGH badge and spend a few minutes shadowing volunteer Tony Chan, 54, a semi-retired stock market trader.

He clocks in time here because he feels especially moved by the bewilderment that older people face in the twisting corridors awash with people.

“You have to walk them to where they need to go. If you point and tell them ‘turn left then turn left again’, they will get lost,” he says.

The area in question is not large. The problem is that it is almost entirely enclosed, so there are no external landmarks to use as reference points.

Pharmacies, cafes, ATM machines and registration desks also repeat themselves along the corridors. You think it is the same one you walked past when it is a different one, or vice versa.

The place does not lack signs, in all the official languages. There are so many that they begin to look the same, even to medical professionals, as I found out later when I had to help a lost doctor from China attending a seminar there find his way back to a cafe from where he had wandered to take snapshots.

Other volunteers tell me it takes about three weeks for someone to know the campus well, enough to tell visitors where each clinic, pharmacy and cafe on Block 3 is without looking at a map. I have one folded in my pocket which I consult furtively, so as not to alert people in my care to the fact that I feel as lost as
they do.

It is particularly busy from 9 to 10am, thanks to the peculiar habits of elderly patients. All are given staggered and equally spaced appointments but they arrive early in the belief that an early check-in means they can jump the queue, a gambit based on a myth, says Mr Chan.

Some, many of whom are retirees, come in early anyway because they have nothing else to do.

Sometimes they are dropped off hours ahead of their appointed times by children who are commuting to work. It makes Mr Chan shake his head with dismay that some dropped-off elderly folks sit in the waiting room for a long time before their appointment, sometimes alone, or with a maid.

The same thing happens during the pick-up. It breaks his heart to see elderly patients sit silently for hours on end, eyes searching the entrance for loved ones to come take them home.

Perhaps it is this feeling that losing one’s mobility is a prison sentence that forces those who obviously need wheelchairs to turn down offers of help.

There is one older man who needs directions to Clinic B. He shuffles with a painfully slow gait but sharply waves away the wheelchair, as if insulted that we could even think of offering it.

I help a foreign couple with a happier task of finding the obstetrician’s clinic. They have come here as medical tourists from Indonesia and are shopping around. I wish them luck.

One retirement-age man needs help finding the urology centre. What time is your appointment, I ask.
 
“In two weeks,” he replies cheerfully. He explains that today is a surveying trip, to get a lay of the land, so he does not waste time wandering about on the day of the appointment. He has heard of Block 3’s fearsome reputation.

He need not have worried.