When CCF founding chairman, Dr Tan Hiang Khoon, was a young houseman at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), he encountered a particularly challenging patient.
She was 14 and suffering from Leukaemia relapse. Her parents were divorced, and her mother, busy with siblings from her second marriage, rarely visited.
"Although her prognosis was poor, she certainly appeared well enough to kick us if we didn't do things her way," says Dr Tan.
One day, Dr Tan noticed her staring intently at a young boy playing with a tetris game. It was the early nineties, where cancer patients were housed side by side with other sick children in TTSH’s 40-bed paediatric ward. Dr Tan knew that the boy would soon be discharged, so he asked to borrow his tetris game, lending it to the teenage Leukaemia patient for three days.
For those three days she was quiet and compliant, engrossed in the game, and it was when Dr Tan saw the world of difference play therapy could make.
The idea of support care took root in the young doctor’s mind, and he roped in a few like-minded friends and together, in 1992, they set up W.A.L.K – Working in Aid of Leukaemic Kids. W.A.L.K was renamed CCF four years later.
"We were so young and we had no experience or track record," he says, smiling as he recalls the past. “But we were enthusiastic, we saw an unmet need and we had the desire to do good for patients.”
Over the next decade, Dr Tan and his team implemented a sustainable programme run by trained social workers at the two hospitals - the National University Hospital and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital - where young patients received treatment. They also established structured intervention programmes comprising counselling, play therapy and parent support groups.
Dr Tan, who stepped down after 10 years as CCF chairman, says succession planning is paramount for the success of an organisation. “If you hold one position for too long, it doesn’t always generate plurality of ideas, which CCF needs in order to grow from strength to strength,” he says.
Today, as the Director of Community Outreach and Philanthropy in National Cancer Centre Singapore, Dr Tan still draws on his early experiences running CCF.
He says, "I saw first hand that the management of a disease rests not just on doctors and nurses. The human being is a complex matrix and all its components, such as mental and emotional well-being, must be addressed in order for us to get a good outcome."