SINGAPORE: The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said on Monday (Feb 18) that it will begin hiring foreigners to complement its emergency medical services (EMS) workforce from March 2025.
The move comes after a surge in demand for emergency medical services over the past decade, with demand expected to increase further in part due to Singapore’s ageing population, SCDF said in a media factsheet.
SCDF’s current EMS workforce is made up of Singapore citizens and permanent residents.
In 2024, SCDF responded to 245,279 emergency medical services calls – the equivalent of about 672 calls daily. This represents a 57 per cent increase from the call volume it handled in 2014.
Almost half of all EMS calls are from patients aged 65 and above, SCDF said.
“Beyond 2025, the number of medical calls is expected to continue to increase along with the ageing population. Thus, SCDF will need to continue to build up its ambulance fleet resources to address the growing demand,” it said.
“Given that SCDF is already facing a shortage of local manpower for the roles of paramedics and emergency medical technicians, SCDF will commence hiring foreigners from March 2025 onwards to complement the local EMS workforce,” it added.
“This approach is consistent with the strategies employed across the wider healthcare sector.”
Speaking at an event at HomeTeamNS Khatib on Tuesday, Minister of State for Home Affairs Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim said that SCDF would initially look to recruit new EMS hires from other Southeast Asian countries.
If necessary, it will then look beyond the region to expand its recruitment pool.
Singaporeans will continue to form the vast majority of SCDF’s workforce, and all foreign hires will “undergo rigorous training” to ensure that they are “accredited to SCDF’s standards”, it said.
“We will ensure that the foreign hires provide a level of service and professionalism that is in accordance with SCDF’s EMS protocols,” it added.
In announcing the move, SCDF highlighted the various measures it has implemented over the years to meet the increasing demand for emergency medical services.
Among these were the augmentation of its EMS fleet through the engagement of private ambulance operators in 2009; the introduction of a tiered-response framework to calibrate its responses to medical cases depending on their severity in 2017; and the implementation of a non-dispatch policy – where it only deploys an ambulance when its 995 operations centre deems a situation to be an actual emergency – in 2023.
