“…As a result, the acute hospitals and specialist services that have been the focus of a health system designed for a younger population needing episodic and disease‐oriented care have been showing signs of systemic stress (Ministry of Health, ). This is evident in the high bed occupancy rates in acute hospitals (Lam, , Ministry of Health, ), overburdened SOCs (Ministry of Health, ), increasing ED utilization (Anantharaman, , Schoenenberger et al ., ), long waiting times for admission to acute hospital wards (Ministry of Health, ) and workforce shortages (Kang and Leong, , Ministry of Health, ). Hospital admissions due to diabetes, for instance, are much higher in Singapore (432 per 100 000 population) than in countries such as the United Kingdom (64) or the United States (149) (OECD, ).…”