We speak to Prof Chua Yeow Leng, a pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon, on the 30 years of his global health journey and the ethos behind his actions.
Prof Chua Yeow Leng’s global health journey has been shaped by one philosophy: that the more you understand the world, the better equipped you are to make a lasting impact on it.
He can recount, off the top of his head, the names of countless colleagues, students, and mentors from every corner of the globe. In his work, he’s amassed a vast network of collaborators, from hospital directors in Indonesia to military officials in Nepal. These connections are not just professional affiliations to him—they represent the essence of two-way learning.
He reflects on his early experiences working with the Wuhan Asia Heart Hospital in China, when he joined a SingHealth team of surgeons to conduct trainings for their Chinese counterparts in 1989.
“We were initially the teachers, but by the early '90s, they were already performing more cardiac surgeries than Singapore, to such a degree of finesse that we began sending our surgeons there for attachments." The sheer volume of patients at Wuhan’s hospital provided Singapore’s budding surgeons with the invaluable exposure to rare conditions they could never encounter back home. The mentors had become the students, and that, for Prof Chua, is a beautiful thing.