The Silver Generation Office (SGO), as the outreach arm of the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC), plays a vital role in connecting with the community through personalised support via home visits. These preventive health visits are carried out primarily by volunteers, making it essential that they are adequately trained to ensure quality interactions and outcomes for our seniors. 

To prepare volunteers, SGO currently runs a two-tier training structure: 

a. A preparation course for newly recruited volunteers. 

b. Refresher or advanced training for experienced volunteers to deepen their knowledge and strengthen their outreach skills. 

The challenge arises from recruitment and turnover. Each recruitment batch can bring in around 1,500 new volunteers within a month and given that many volunteers serve only for a limited period, there is constant changeover in manpower. At any point, SGO manages an average pool of about 8,000 volunteers, with projections to grow to 12,000 the following year. 

Delivering effective training at this scale is highly resource intensive. Current training consists of classroom lessons, role play activities, and practical exposure (e.g., shadowing experienced staff during house visits). However, these sessions face significant operational bottlenecks: 

a. Capacity constraints: Training is conducted at the AIC office, which can accommodate only 30 participants per session. 

b. High facilitator-to-volunteer ratio: For role play sessions, an ideal ratio is 1 facilitator to every 2–3 volunteers, which is difficult to maintain given limited manpower. 

c. Increasing training demand: The current recruitment load requires a higher frequency of training rounds than SGO can provide due to existing manpower and space constraints. 

In addition to logistical challenges, SGO also needs help with quality control in training. Standardizing classroom content is manageable, but the effectiveness of experiential components, specifically role-play activities, relies heavily on the individual facilitator's skill in guiding and enacting scenarios. This performance variability among facilitators results in inconsistent outcomes, meaning not all volunteers receive the intended same quality of preparation. 

In summary, SGO faces a dual challenge – scaling of training capacity to meet a growing volunteer base, while ensuring consistency and quality in the delivery of training, particularly in experiential components like role play and shadowing. Overcoming these barriers presents a clear opportunity to reimagine training delivery in a scalable, consistent and resource-efficient way, ensuring volunteers are well-prepared to create impact in the lives of seniors. 

1. Outcomes of the desired state include: 

a. Accessible and Frictionless Training

i. Training is available on-demand, reducing dependence on physical space and staff availability. 

ii. No need for wearables or complicated setups; volunteers can access the training anytime, anywhere. 

b. Realistic and Comprehensive Role Play Simulation 

i. The solution effectively simulates scenarios and environments that mirror real-world outreach challenges. 

ii. Role play scenario includes households with special needs, seniors with cognitive conditions, multiple seniors in one household, pre-frail or isolated individuals, and potential elderly abuse cases. 

iii. Enable volunteers to gain practical experience handling sensitive and complex situations in a safe training environment. 

c. Consistent and Measurable Training Quality 

i. The solution can conduct assessments and provide feedback on volunteer role-pay performance. 

ii. Volunteer training progress is tracked, enabling targeted interventions and ensuring consistent training standards across cohorts. 

d. Scalable and Sustainable Training Delivery 

i. Training capacity can grow with the expanding volunteer base without being constrained by space or manpower. 

ii. The solution needs to ensure long-term sustainability, consistency, and quality in volunteer preparation. 

e. Simple and Intuitive User Experience

i. Volunteers can operate the solution with ease, regardless of their technological proficiency. 

ii. The solution is self-managed, minimising reliance on individual for setup or troubleshoot.

2. Overall collaboration requirements:  

a. Scalable: The proposed solutions should consider a broader plan to scale across other healthcare institutions and settings and consider the need to integrate and interface with the various relevant systems.  

b. Cost-effectiveness: The proposed solutions must be cost-effective and beneficial to the public healthcare in Singapore. To support time motion study (if needed) to justify/support the business case and return on investment (ROI).  

c. Implementation Timeline: This POC collaboration is scoped to address the challenge statement, and the trial completion period is to be capped at not more than 3 months (including the setup of the trial).   

d. Cost: The proposed solution should include indicative cost (business model) for the short-term implementation and long-term scaling prospects.   

For full details on the use cases, please click here.