Tarcisus Ho is highly committed to his career as a practicing nurse, and is always seeking new learning, knowledge, and skills.

He graduated from Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine in 2017, and began his nursing career with the Health Promotion Board (HPB). He started with an administrative role, overseeing a programme that focused on weight management and smoking cessation in schools, before moving to health services, managing vaccination and health screenings in schools.

Wanting to contribute much more, he looked to expand his skills with a Graduate Certificate in Clinical Decision Making and Management.

“I felt that nurses could actually do more with physical assessment and screening of the students”, he said, explaining that this task is usually done by doctors. “Looking at it from a resource point of view, nurses could also do this”, asserted Tarcisus, “and that would save manpower cost and possibly free up doctors to focus on other more critical functions.”

The course helped him sharpen his clinical skills, which were put to good use in an important and impactful way, when he was assigned to the worker dormitories during the pandemic.

“I had to assist in quarantine, and because of my clinical reasoning skills, I was put on the ground to segregate people based on Covid-19 signs and symptoms, so I got to use a lot of my clinical reasoning skills.”

Tarcisus has his work cut out for him at his new position at National University Hospital (NUH). He holds a positive view on lifelong learning and may consider a Master of Nursing programme in the future.

To sum up his view on lifelong learning, he has this to say: “As a healthcare professional, it is necessary to keep abreast of current knowledge, skills and practices to deliver the best standard of care to patients.”