More Patients to be Offered Choice to Receive Hospital Care at Home

Expansion of such 'virtual bed' service aims to help ease hospital congestion

- Joyce Teo

In a bid to balance the number of beds that hospitals can manage with the growing need for health care, more patients will be given the option to be cared for at home in virtual wards, rather than in a hospital.

The Mobile Inpatient Care @ Home or MIC@Home programme allows teams of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals to care for suitable patients in the comfort of their own homes through a combination of teleconsultations and home visits.

They are an alternative for patients who would otherwise be admitted to an acute hospital, said the Ministry of Health (MOH).

A spokesperson for MOH said the service will be offered to patients who are assessed by the hospital clinical teams to require acute care that can be safely provided at home, and that they will be encouraged to consider it as their first option of care.

Suitable patients are those with conditions such as dengue, cellulitis, gastroenteritis and urinary tract infections, which have established treatment plans that consist of medication, antibiotics or fluids delivered intravenously, for instance. They can be monitored remotely, and they will communicate with the care team using their mobile phones or video-conferencing platforms.

Despite the name "virtual bed", these patients sleep in their own beds at home. They must be able to care for themselves, or have a caregiver at home.

As at March 2025, there are about 200 MIC@Home beds across all public acute hospitals, almost double the 104 beds in January 2024.

As the service expands, public acute hospitals will progressively increase the number of MIC@Home beds, depending on the demand, MOH said.

One of them, Woodlands Health hospital, started out with 15 beds in May 2024 when its emergency department and acute wards started operations, increasing this to 20 virtual ward beds by January 2025. It plans to have 30 in a year.