“How come you don’t have hands?” gasped Mabel as she stared at her new friend, Zoe. I froze. “Gosh, is this how children make friends these days?” I thought to myself. Beside me stood Zoe, a 9-year-old double amputee, silent as she processed the weight of Mabel’
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By Jonathan Francis Koh Wu Teng This piece was selected as a winning entry in the CHEER™ Short Story Contest: Healing Tales 2025. This is part of a broader effort to capture the lived experiences of Allied Health and Pharmacy professionals. The contest highlights authentic stories that reflect the CHEER™
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By Lim Peng Hoon It was a hectic afternoon in the CT scan room when I met this five-year old girl Lily and her mother. The moment they walked in, I could see the fear in Lily’s wide eyes as she clung to her mom’s leg, her
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I always wanted to be a doctor. As a child, I was raised on a steady diet of medical dramas—ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and glossy Asian serials (Love Revolution - in a time where Jdramas were a thing) where everyone moved with certainty and never spilled coffee on their white
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The upcoming Singapore Medical Humanities Conference is in October 2026. It's about what illness actually means — not what the chart says it means. You should come. Here's why. Learn more Once a year, the people who think about medicine and the people who live with it
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Jean Si-En Behrend
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Geonelynn Gonzaga Turingan
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Lourdes Ducusin Galang
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Mok Yee Hui
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Or: How I Learned to Stop Wondering and Relate to Dr. Cox
Keep reading →Personal essays from clinicians, nurses, allied health. The on-call you remember. The patient who stayed with you.
The view from the bed, the bedside, the waiting room. We especially want these — they matter the most.
Lyric, narrative, speculative, silly, mournful. Written on the back of a rounds sheet.
A teddy bear. A box of unopened tea. Write about one object and the story it holds.
Anything you want to look at carefully and tell us about.
A paragraph. A sketch. A single sentence on a post-it. The easiest place to start.
HEART started because medical humanities can sound like a closed club. We don't want to run that room. We want to run the pantry next door, where people come in, make a kopi, and tell you something they haven't been able to say all week.
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