ACCESS Health Singapore Hosts Workshop on Bone Health for the Bone Alliance
The importance of good bone health is often overlooked. When people do think about it, it is often framed around aging and bone fragility and even then it is often not thought of until after an accident occurs. There is opportunity to broaden our understanding of bone health and create new momentum for action through thoughtful collaborations among like-minded organizations and individuals.
In light of this, ACCESS Health and a team of partners launched Bone Alliance Singapore, a multisectoral, public private partnership. Bone Alliance Singapore will pave the way for bone health promotion, meaningful stakeholder engagement, and enhanced treatment and diagnosis, all with the purpose of improving patient outcomes. The nine member alliance is working together toward a shared mission to raise awareness and enable high quality of life through better bone health. ACCESS Health is honored to serve as the secretariat of the Alliance.
To fulfill its mission, Bone Alliance Singapore will be building a Collaborative Action Plan to collectively pursue initiatives that create solutions to close the gaps and improve awareness and early identification and interventions for bone health ailments. To build consensus around a Collaborative Action Plan and ensure it is built from the ground up, the Bone Alliance will be gathering perspectives from the community and practitioners via two series of workshops. These workshops will give participants the opportunity to express their thoughts on current issues, visions for the future, and suggested solutions to improve bone health in Singapore. The Bone Alliance will incorporate insights from the community and practitioners, as Alliance members forge a vision statement and build a Collaborative Action Plan for improving bone health in the country.
This July, in collaboration with ThinkPlace, Bone Alliance Singapore held its first workshop involving various community stakeholders, including patients, caregivers, and civil society. During this half day workshop, participants shared their experiences on their current state of bone health, particularly from the perspective of those afflicted with bone ailments, and imagined future scenarios that the community felt were desirable for bone health in Singapore. Using these future scenarios, participants then generated ideas that they felt could help the community reach this desired future state. As a result of the discussions, Alliance members and participants were able to highlight the key moments of a citizen’s journey in bone health and identify key shifts that the community desired for bone health, based on the current and future state of bone health in Singapore.
A subsequent workshop will take place in September will build on the momentum from the first and will further enhance efforts to build a meaningful Collaborative Action Plan to drive collective change, multistakeholder collaboration, and improve bone health in Singapore.