The Department of General Surgery has a distinguished history, having been established with the founding of the hospital in the 19th century.

The mission of the department is to advance surgical care, education and research in the Central Region of Singapore and beyond. We achieve this by providing a comprehensive spectrum of services, tailored towards accurate and timely diagnosis with management of all general surgical conditions in both inpatient and outpatient settings. A drive towards minimally invasive surgery has resulted in a shorter length of stay for patients, smaller surgical incisions, reduction in morbidity and complications, and overall improvement in surgical outcomes. This has allowed an increasing proportion of surgical procedures to be performed in our ambulatory surgery centre where suitable patients are not required to be admitted to the hospital following their operation and can be discharged on the same day or after a short overnight stay.

We excel in both undergraduate and postgraduate education as the primary clinical training partner for Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University and also an affiliated teaching hospital of Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. We are also a training centre for the National Healthcare Group General Surgery Residency Program and support other postgraduate programs and surgical specialties including the Surgery-in-General and Postgraduate Year 1 Residency Programmes. We are passionate about surgical education as this continues our strong tradition of ensuring high standards in the practice of the craft of Surgery.

The Department has also successfully introduced an Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) program, which was initially implemented in Colorectal Surgery and subsequently in the other sub-subspecialties. We are also active in initiatives to detect and treat fraility in our elderly surgical patients to optimise them for surgery and ensuring the best post-operative outcome.