01 Nov 2010
Associate Professor Marcus Ong, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, mentors budding clinician scientists on the Khoo Clinician Scientist Programme and supervises medical students in their third-year research projects.
“I want to do something that makes a difference, and investing in people’s lives as a mentor and a teacher is my way of doing so. If I am able to train 50 doctors, I can improve patient care by so much more than if I were working on my own,” said Assoc Prof Ong.
This motivation to help and encourage others comes in part from his experience as a student. “I spent a part of my life overseas as a specialist in training, and what really impressed me about the style of education abroad is how much support and encouragement junior doctors got,” he said.
“I had the privilege of having world famous clinician-researchers as my mentors in US and Canada, and they went out of their way to make me feel at home and develop my thinking,” he added.
Because he knows that sitting in a class can be tedious, he injects lots of personal anecdotes in his teaching to make his lessons more interesting. At the same time, such anecdotes help him connect with his students, said Assoc Prof Ong. “Front-line battle stories from the emergency department always catch their attention!” he added.
Indeed, being in the thick of “frontline battles” suits Assoc Prof Ong just fine. He loves the variety and urgency of medical cases at Singapore General Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine, where he is a Consultant.
“Emergency medicine is really for those with a wide range of interests.
We tend to be people who get bored of routine,” he said.
The emergency room and the pressure of dealing with cases that often require split-second decisions are not for the faint-hearted or nervous, said this quiet and unassuming man, who finds his oasis in time spent with his family and playing the guitar with his church band.
Assoc Prof Ong is also deeply involved in research, including the use of real-time heart rate variability to predict cardiac arrest in the emergency room – the first such study in the world – and in areas such as prehospital emergency care for heart attack and stroke cases, and the development of cardiac and resuscitation medical devices.
But his heart remains in teaching. “I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life as a doctor researching one protein or how to operate on the big toe,” he said.
“I feel that being able to pass on my knowledge to the next generation of doctors is just as rewarding as inventing a new treatment or device,” he added.
Click here for jpeg format
Dept of Emergency Medicine
« Back to previous
page
back to top