About Ward Index
Who writes here, how entries on Singapore hospitals and costs are researched, and how corrections work.
What this is
Ward Index is a reference desk for healthcare in Singapore: dated lists of hospitals by specialty, what treatment costs, how referrals work, and what MediSave, MediShield Life and Integrated Shield Plans actually pay for. Entries are written so a reader can check the facts themselves — shorter than essays, longer than a bare directory listing.
Who writes here
Ward Index is written and maintained by Nghia Hoang. One person, not a newsroom, and it is worth saying which rather than leaving a masthead to imply the other.
He is not a doctor, and nothing here is medical, legal or financial advice. What happens here is narrower than that and easier to check: the public record is read — hospital charge pages, Ministry of Health bill data, scheme documents, published fee schedules — and set down in one place with the source and the date attached.
That last part is the point. A byline says who to hold responsible; it does not make a figure correct. So nothing here asks to be taken on trust: every number names the page it came from and the day it was read, and you can go and check it without believing anything about the person who typed it.
Where that has failed, it is written up on the corrections page rather than quietly fixed — including the times the error was live for months before anyone caught it.
How entries are researched
Every figure here is tied to the page it was read from and the day it was read. That is the whole method, and the rest follows from it.
A number that cannot be traced is deleted, not softened. Several tables on this site are shorter than they were because a figure had nothing behind it. An invented range is not a cautious estimate — it is wrong in whichever direction the guess happened to fall.
Figures are held as data, not just as sentences. Each one is recorded against its source URL, and a check can go back to that page and ask whether the number is still there. A fee schedule that is revised leaves an entry quoting last year’s figure with exactly the confidence it had when it was right, and that is the failure this is built to catch.
A published range is the middle of observed cases, not a quote. Where a figure comes from the Ministry of Health’s bill data, the entry names the procedure code it was read from, because the same operation by another route is a different code and a different bill.
Silence in a source is not a fact about the world. If a ministry table does not list something, that means the table does not list it — not that the thing does not exist. A claim resting on an absence needs two sources that affirm it before it is published. This rule exists because the site broke it: an entry concluded that a ward class carried no subsidy because it was missing from one table, and two hospitals said otherwise in their own words.
What was not checked is said to be unchecked. Entries that were verified for their figures but not their surrounding guidance say so at the bottom, so a date on a number is not read as a date on the prose around it.
When this site is wrong
It has been, and the corrections page lists the times it was published and wrong: what was said, what the source says, and where the replacement came from.
A reference desk that never prints a correction is not careful. It is either lucky or not looking.
How often entries change
Hospital scope, fee benchmarks and scheme rules move. Entries carry a publish date and a revision date, and are updated when the underlying source changes, not on a fixed schedule.
Corrections
If an entry is wrong, write to the desk through the contact page. The correction is applied to the entry, its revision date changes, and the correction is written up on the corrections page with the source that settled it.