Prof Ong, as well as Clinical Professor Chan Choong Meng, who is Senior Associate Dean in the Office of Education at Duke-NUS, are among five individual and team recipients from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre (AMC) who were honoured at the ceremony. Prof Chan was named National Outstanding Clinician Educator while a team led by Duke-NUS Associate Professor Swapna Kamal Verma from the Institute of Mental Health won the National Clinical Excellence Team award.
Prof Ong has dedicated much of his career as a clinician-scientist to improving the lives of patients, focusing on areas such as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), and prehospital emergency care.
At the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) where he practises as a senior consultant, Prof Ong’s efforts have led to a 10-fold improvement in the survival rate for OHCA—a breakthrough made possible by several interventions introduced by his team over the last 20 years. Some of these measures include the use of high-performance cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR, manual defibrillation, mechanical CPR, as well as drugs such as vasopressin, intraosseous devices, motorcycle paramedics, first responder apps and other innovations.
The impact of Prof Ong’s data driven research also extends to prehospital emergency care, helping to shape government policies both locally and regionally that have been instrumental in saving lives. As the founding Chairman of the Pan-Asian Resuscitation Outcomes Study clinical research network, which includes clinicians, researchers and policymakers from 14 countries, Prof Ong has effected changes in prehospital emergency care policy in Asia.