Sound advice MOH scholar and speech therapist Naomi Wong pursues a career which allows her to help people enhance the quality of their lives By Susan Leong MINISTRY of Health (MOH) scholar Naomi Wong Lee Yoon’s short stay in hospital when she was 14 sowed the seeds of her future career. She recalls the constant reassurance and kindness of the medical staff, who made her realise that she too wanted a career that could help enhance the quality of life. Like many of her peers in school, she had aspired to read medicine, but the area of specialisation had remained hazy until she was in junior college. “I learnt about the roles of various allied health disciplines, and I became fascinated by what they can do,” she says. “These allied health individuals are able to address the difficulties that patients have, which in turn has direct impact on their quality of life. Also, I’ve seen first-hand how my friends and relatives have benefited from various therapies.” “I remember meeting a wheelchair-bound youth at church. He had a wheelchair to help him get from one place to another, and his family helped him with his daily routines. But there was nothing to help him communicate or speak better, and I had no clue about how to help. This was when I seriously considered speech-language therapy.” Ms Wong eventually took up the Overseas Specialist Awards (Paramedical) for at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where she spent four years getting her Bachelor of Speech Pathology (Hons) degree. The scholarship is now called the MOH Health Science Scholarship. After graduating in 2004, she spent three years at Tan Tock Seng Hospital as a speech therapist where she worked with patients who have communication or swallowing difficulties. She is currently attached to the National University Hospital, where she works mainly with children with hearing impairment and auditory processing difficulties. “I am part of a multi-disciplinary team that comprises the audiologist, doctors and speech therapists,” she says. “When a hearing aid is fitted on a child, my role involves teaching her to make sense of the sounds or noises that she hears from the environment so that she can focus on the useful speech signals. For children with auditory processing difficulties, I teach them to listen better, so that they can fully understand the information they hear — not just the words, but also the intended meaning within the tone of voice.” While scholarship holders are usually regarded as book-smart, Ms Wong says it is just as important to be people-oriented. She says: “Get involved in activities, socialise with people from different nationalities to broaden your world view — that’s the best way to pick up ‘out-of-book’ life skills.”