On 26 August 2006, SGH-PGMI signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with South Korea’s Samsung Medical Center (SMC) to collaborate on the latter’s Internal Medicine Excellence College (IMEC) Programme. This programme is targeted at doctors of Korea’s semi-hospitals, which have 100–400 beds. These doctors not only treat inpatients in their own specialty areas, they also attend to outpatients across the board. As such, they are in need of comprehensive training in internal medicine subspecialties and related topics. The IMEC Programme aims to equip these healthcare professionals with the medical knowledge and skills that will allow them to treat their patients more effectively.
The first IMEC programme was conducted in May 2006 with much success. To build on this, SMC has decided that their future programmes should be run in collaboration with other top-calibre teaching hospitals from the Asia-Pacific region and an invitation to was extended to SGH.
Other than participating in the IMEC programme, the MOU will provide SGH with opportunities for further cooperation, for example in other postgraduate programmes and fellowships.