Tote Board Community Health Fund

Eligibility Criteria

To be eligible for TBCHF, you must be one of the below organisations and institutions:

Co-operatives
Non-Profit Organisations (Companies Limited by Guarantee, Charity Trusts and Societies) / Social Service Agencies
Social Enterprises which are members of the Singapore Centre for Social Enterprise (raiSE)
Regional Healthcare Systems
Government Agencies
Public Healthcare Institutions
Grassroots Organisations
Private service providers that serve subsidised clients (e.g. private nursing homes on portable subsidy)

Three Key Priorities:
Care and Support

New care models to allow the senior to be better cared for within the community, and to focus on more client-centric care that is customised to the client’s needs
Support for niche groups of caregivers (e.g. senior caregivers to spouse/children with disabilities)
Community networks to support individual family units in their caregiving responsibilities
Secondary prevention (e.g. preventing/ delaying frailty)

Care Integration

Capability building for community providers to expand scope to provide social and health services
Setting up linkages and protocols between different community providers to manage clients across multiple services

Emerging Areas

Identify new priorities as sector evolves

To find out more about the TBCHF, please download the following documents:

Factsheet
Post-Approval Administrative Requirements

Application

Applications are accepted throughout the year and project can only commence two (2) months after approval from Evaluation Panel (EP) has been obtained.

The application closing and project commencement dates are as follows:

Application Closing	Evaluation Panel (EP) meeting conducted in
31 March	July
31 July	November
30 November	March of following year

Please email tbchf@aic.sg with the programme synopsis (below) and the TBCHF Secretariat will assess if the proposal is suitable for TBCHF funding.

What are the needs and gaps that the programme is trying to meet?

What is the desired value of the programme Who are the targeted beneficiaries?

What is the funding request and duration?

What are the deliverables, outcome and KPIs?

Is the programme seeking other funding or currently funded by others?

Applications from Public Healthcare Institutions that relate to community interventions should receive support and endorsement from their Regional Health System-HQ.

Submit an electronic copy of the fully completed signed Application Form (MS Word format and PDF format), Proposed Budget Spreadsheet (MS Excel format and PDF format) and 3 years financial statements to tbchf@aic.sg before application closing date.

Any incomplete applications by the closing date will be considered for the subsequent grant call, unless otherwise stated. Scanned copies of signed submissions shall be in high resolution, in color and not exceeding 3MB for each file.

Queries

Please refer to the FAQ for TBCHF for more information. If you have any queries, you may contact the TBCHF Secretariat at tbchf@aic.sg.

Programmes under Care and Support

Applicant: Bright Vision Hospital (implementation site at Sengkang Community Hospital)

Programme Name: BVH Integrated Primary Care for At Risk Elderly (iPCARE 2.0)

Programme Background: 

In Singapore’s current healthcare system, General Practitioners (GPs) usually encounter multiple challenges caring for patients with complex needs and inevitably lands up referring them to public or tertiary institutions (e.g. polyclinics, specialist outpatient clinics) where there are abundant resources. Moreover, these patients or their caregivers find it difficult to navigate and coordinate their care services across different healthcare settings.

From 2017 to 2020, iPCARE has been established as a proof-of-concept, supporting an alternative model of integrating primary and community care services. It showed that:

Patients with complex needs were willing to be seen by their GP for medical care, with other care needs1 coordinated by the iPCARE team and supported by resources from the nearby community hospital;

GPs were willing to accept such patients, and were receptive towards the iPCARE team providing support to both GPs and patients outside of the GPs’ scope of work or working hours.

iPCARE 2.0 aims to further explore how to improve the integration between primary and community care; and evaluate the costs and barriers of anchoring such patients with the GPs (instead of acute hospitals and specialist outpatient clinics) and in the community by answering the following questions:

What are the patient archetypes that GPs are reluctant to manage today?
What are the services and resources that the GPs would require to better manage these patient archetypes?
What is the overall cost of such a service bundle?
The lessons learned from iPCARE 2.0 could also potentially help to develop the next phase of Primary Care Networks (PCN) so more GPs and patients could benefit from it.
Clinic-based and home-based care e.g. nursing, allied health and social care services provided by a community hospital’s outpatient clinic, major home and social providers.

Programmes under Care Integration

Applicant:Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation (Singapore)

Programme Name:Conservative (Non-Dialysis) Management of Patients with End Stage Renal Disease Programme Background:

Singapore ranks the 4th highest in the number of end stage kidney failure globally. On average, 5 people are diagnosed with end stage kidney disease every day, based on the Singapore Renal Registry 2018, and this number is expected to increase, with an aging population and with increasing prevalence of diseases like diabetes. Besides dialysis and transplant, conservative care is another modality to care for the patients with end stage kidney disease.

Comprehensive Conservative Management (CM) is an active management without dialysis. These includes a shared decision-making process, interventions to delay kidney disease progression and minimise the adverse events and complications, management of symptoms related to end stage kidney failure without dialysis, and psychological, social and family support. The elderly patients with multiple health conditions, are frail or have declining health where the risks for dialysis are high - CM is an alternative treatment to support these patients in order to maintain their quality of life and to support their love ones.

For this pilot programme, Tzu Chi (TC) plans to:

increase ESRD patients’ awareness of CM so they can make informed decisions on care options;
partner Sengkang General Hospital (SKH) to identify ESRD patients who would not benefit from dialysis and refer them to the CM programme
upskill its Home Nursing and Home Medical teams to provide continuity of care for these patients who opt for CM (e.g. renal failure symptoms, e.g. swelling, anaemia, etc.);
discuss Advance Care Planning (ACP) with patients; and
transit CM patients to its Home Palliative team if prognosis is 12 months or less (or refer to hospice if patients’ condition could not be managed at their home).

The pilot would help to inform policy, support the scale up of CM capabilities in other community care providers, and evolve the support for home care patients.

Programmes under Emerging Areas

Applicant: Drama Box Ltd (db)

Programme Name: Both Sides, Now (BSN) 2021 – 2023

Programme Background:

Drama Box had tapped on TBCHF to pilot a programme that used arts-based performances and installations to increase awareness of End-of-Life (EOL) issues among seniors, and promote Advance Care Planning (ACP) conversations in Chong Pang and Telok Blangah community.

With the lessons learnt from this pilot, Drama Box hopes to identify cultural factors that influence or deter individuals from embracing ACP, and develop culturally-relevant engagement approaches towards EOL conversations. In this iteration, Drama Box will focus on the Malay-Muslim (M-M) community to:

Identify factors influencing or deterring the M-M community from embracing ACP, and factors that could facilitate this process;
Identify culturally relevant approaches to engaging the M-M community on EOL and ACP; and
Outreach to the M-M community through a more person-centred and culturally sensitive approach on EOL and ACP.

The pilot could help to enhance MOH’s and AIC’s initiative to scale ACP nationwide, and learn:

Factors preventing the community from embracing EOL and ACP;
The approaches to engage the community on EOL and ACP; and
The resources needed to support the community to consider and undertake ACP.

​​​​​​​​​Seed Fund For Innovative Programmes

Seed Fund For Innovative Programmes