I am honoured to deliver this citation for Emeritus Prof Kua Ee Heok for his conferment of the SMA Honorary Membership. I shall speak on his leadership in psychiatry and his contributions to Singapore and Asia.
Leadership in psychiatry
Prof Kua Ee Heok graduated as a doctor in 1973 from the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. His training in psychiatry was at Oxford University and geriatric psychiatry at Harvard University. In 1990, he was invited by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the Global Study of Dementia and started the first Memory Clinic in Asia in 1990 at the National University Hospital (NUH).
In 1994, he was appointed head of the Department of Psychological Medicine, at both the National University of Singapore (NUS) and NUH. He faced two challenges in the fields of mental health and ageing – stigma and ageism. As part of the anti-stigma campaign, he organised many public mental health talks, and as president of the Gerontological Society, he organised seminars on ageing. In 1996, he was appointed vice-dean of Medicine, where he expanded the undergraduate teaching of psychiatry from two to six weeks and introduced geriatric psychiatry to the curriculum. As the editor of the Singapore Medical Journal from 1996 to 1999, he encouraged publications on mental health, and his editorial, Doctor under stress, was very well read and cited.
In 1999, he was appointed CEO and medical director of Woodbridge Hospital. The two challenges he encountered were staff morale and stigma. He decided to rebrand the hospital as the Institute of Mental Health (IMH). He also persuaded NUS to move postgraduate psychiatry training to IMH, and for the National Medical Research Council to give more research grants. He started two new programmes – the Early Psychosis Intervention Programme and Community Addiction Management Programme.
Contributions to Singapore and Asia
After he left IMH in 2002, he was invited to give a lecture at Harvard University and spoke on dementia prevention. The philanthropist, Mr Lee Soon Teck, provided him a space at Jurong Point Mall, and in 2011, the first dementia prevention programme in Asia was launched by then Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Using non-drug activities, including health education, mindfulness practice, art activities, music reminiscence, therapeutic horticulture and tai chi exercise, the prevalence of dementia of the cohort after five years was 3%, lower than the expected 6%, and lower than the estimated prevalence of 10%, in the population aged 60 and older. The study was selected for presentation at the World Congress of Psychiatry in Vienna in 2023. This programme, called the Age Well Everyday (AWE) programme, is of translational significance and is now used in ten community centres across Singapore. Many Asian countriesincluding China, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia are keen on the AWE programme as well.
Prof Kua has played a major role in enhancing the status of psychiatry in Singapore and Asia. From 2009 to 2012, he was president of the Pacific-Rim College of Psychiatrists and chief editor of the journal Asia-Pacific Psychiatry. He is the coordinator of the Teachers of Psychiatry Club to train psychiatrists in ASEAN countries and China. He has published 400 scientific papers and 30 books on psychiatry and ageing. Additionally, he is the editor-in-chief with Prof Norman Sartorius of the new seven-volume series, Mental Health and Illness Worldwide, published by Springer Nature. From the WHO research, he constructed a questionnaire for screening of dementia, which is now used by doctors in Singapore and Asia.
Prof Kua is the first Singapore doctor to be invited by the United Nations (UN) to deliver a lecture in New York in 1999 at the UN conference titled "Depression: The Hidden Illness". In 2000, he was a member of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Healthcare of Elderly and in 2001, he was appointed chairman of Ministry of Health Specialty Committee for Psychiatry. In the 2004 World Ageing Conference, he was chairman of the Scientific Committee. After the tsunami tragedy at Aceh, Indonesia in 2004, he was invited by the Indonesian government to join the Tsunami Task Force. In 2005, he was appointed chairman, Specialist Advisory Board (Psychiatry), Ministry of Defence. He was also a member of the National Medical Research Council and is the vice-chairman of NUS Mind Science Centre.
Prof Kua is very supportive of the arts and his research team conducted the first study in the world on choral singing and art therapy to improve cognition of seniors using biological markers, including MRI brain scans. His first novel, Listening to Letter from America, which has an anti-ageism theme, is used in a Harvard University course on anthro-pology and was adapted into a musical last year, in 2023.
In 2016, he partnered NParks in the seminal study on the therapeutic garden to improve the physical, mental and social health of seniors. A paper was published in Nature, and subsequently NParks set up 14 more therapeutic gardens. His study on the therapeutic rainforest was presented at the World Congress of Psychiatry in 2022 and stirred interest as a possible strategy to protect the rainforest, prevent global warming and improve planetary health.
For his volunteer service to seniors, he was awarded the Public Service Medal on National Day 1994. And for his service to the Singapore Armed Forces, he was awarded the Public Service Star on National Day 2018.
SMA President, distinguished guests and colleagues, I present Emeritus Prof Kua Ee Heok as most worthy of being conferred the SMA Honorary Membership.
Honorary Membership recipient Prof Kua Ee Heok (centre) with Prof Kenneth Mak and Dr Ng Chee Kwan