The Department organised a Health and Wellness talk titled “Self-Care and Preventive Health – Pharmacists Share Some Tips!” in partnership with Office of Alumni Relations on 7 April 2022. It was held in a hybrid format with an in-person audience at the Shaw Foundation Alumni House and online participation via Zoom. The event drew a total of 168 attendees (online and in-person) from 9 countries which included Australia, Canada, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, United States and Singapore.

After two years of organising virtual events, it was refreshing to finally meet and speak to a live audience. Our alumni speakers Ms Chung Wing Lam (Class of ’09) and Mr Colin Tang (Class of ’14), both Principal Clinical Pharmacists at Watson’s Personal Care Stores Pte Ltd, were thrilled and delivered bountiful tips and resources to help our audience better manage their physical and mental well-being, and medications. They covered 4 main topics of self-care, diabetes management, smoking cessation and self-medication.

When the audience was posed a question on whether people with diabetes required a special diet, many answered yes. However, Ms Chung shared that the “special diet” of eating food with low glycemic index, avoiding sugary drinks, and exercising portion control is in fact a diet recommended for everyone, with or without diabetes. Healthy eating is also one of the seven pillars of self-care.

To encourage good practice in self-medication, Mr Tang shared guiding principles on when one should seek medical attention and stop self-medicating. On the topic of medication management and storage, he orientated the audience to the important information that is typically written on medicine labels and showed pictures of poor and good medicine storage practice.