Singapore had no dedicated clinic for people with intellectual disabilities — so this doctor built one

There is a version of Dr Chen Shiling’s life that never happened. In it, she is a nephrologist — a kidney specialist with a clear career ladder, instead of the 12 years advocating for good-quality healthcare for adults with intellectual disabilities (IDs) that defined the one she actually lived. 

That alternate account fell away quietly in 2011, when Dr Chen walked out of a nephrology training programme, with no institution backing her and no guarantee that anyone would ever call her work necessary. “It began with a very simple desire,” the 45-year-old says thoughtfully. “I wanted to provide people with IDs and autism the healthcare that they need and deserve.”

The Institute of Mental Health defines ID as a developmental disorder marked by significant limitations in intelligence, daily living skills, and the onset of these limitations before a person turns 18. 

People with intellectual disabilities tend to face a higher burden of other health conditions on top of their ID, explains Dr Chen. These include mobility issues, sensory processing difficulties and cognitive and communication challenges which make it hard for many of them to navigate a mainstream healthcare system.

“For example, people with IDs develop dementia sometimes much earlier than the general population and their presentation can be different,” she explains. “The interventions needed and the way we diagnose them is different, because we cannot use the same diagnostic tools that we use for the general population.”

Today, Dr Chen runs IDHealth, Singapore’s first community-based, full-service healthcare clinic dedicated to adults with IDs. Located at Upper Thomson Road, IDHealth operates under Happee Hearts Movement, the non-profit organisation Dr Chen founded in 2014. Happee Hearts Movement was registered as a formal charity in 2022, with IDHealth launching alongside it.

While she started out solo, she now has 30 people working with her, consisting of clinical, operations, administration and volunteer management teams. At present, the clinic has cared for around 500 patients and more than 1000 of their caregivers. Fees are highly subsidised — $50 for a first assessment, $20 to $30 for reviews — funded through government grants and public donations. 

“While nephrology offered a path that was straightforward and well-trodden, there was another path ahead that was uncertain and fraught with obstacles,” Dr Chen says of her venture into unchartered waters. “But I couldn’t look away from the challenging path because my eyes had been open to it.”

Why Dr Chen decided to pursue medicine

Dr Chen was 17 years old when two things that would shape the trajectory of her life happened almost at once. Her paternal grandmother, who had raised her and to whom she was extremely close, was diagnosed with dementia. She also began volunteering with MINDS, working with people with IDs.

Back then, Dr Chen never thought she would become a doctor. Her childhood dream was to become a psychologist and her favourite subject in school was English Literature.

However, the parallel experiences nurtured the caregiver in her. She accompanied her grandmother to appointments, sat with her on her first day at a dementia daycare centre, and watched her decline in real time. At the same time, every Sunday for six years, she showed up at MINDS — not as a clinician, but as a student who genuinely wanted to keep coming back.

“It was life changing in ways I didn’t even know at that point in time,” Dr Chen says with a small smile. “I wasn’t in the medical field then so I really just got to know people with IDs and their families as human beings.”

She adds: “It showed me a lot about human frailties, but also about human resilience, about suffering — but also about how there can still be joy and strength amid all that suffering.”

By the time she applied to medical school at National University of Singapore (NUS) a year later, the throughline had become clear to her. Dr Chen wanted a life that could help people, the way sitting with her grandmother and volunteering at MINDS already had. 

Dr Chen graduated from NUS in 2005 and became a nephrology registrar in 2010 — this was the same year she went back to MINDS as a doctor, this time running health screenings for adults with IDs. What she found alarmed her: gap after gap in how this population accessed basic healthcare.

Her first instinct wasn’t to leave the system, but to fix it from inside. She went to her seniors and department heads and offered them a deal —  if any of them wanted to take on this gap, she would leave her own training and build the service for them, from scratch.

But every mentor she had advised her to stay in her training instead. “It struck me that if I couldn’t do it within the hospital setting, then I had to find another way,” she muses.

Making the decision to leave the nephrology training programme was the hardest of her career, complicated by the fact that her family was going through financial strain at the time. 

Ultimately, it was Dr Chen’s shift in mindset that sealed the deal for her. At first, she thought she was choosing between trying and failing versus succeeding. It was later when she realised that she was choosing between trying and possibly failing, and not trying and living with the regret of never having tried at all.

“When I saw it that way, I knew I had to try. But I had to accept the fact that if I failed, I may never have a chance to go back to that original career path again,” she confesses. “Once I accepted that, that was the biggest turning point.”

How IDHealth was launched

What followed was not the successful launch of a clinic for people with IDs but eight years of near-total improvisation. Having failed to find a hospital champion, Dr Chen tried government agencies, then philanthropic organisations, reasoning each time that someone with more resources than “just a doctor” would take up the cause. 

Despite her constant pursuit of her dream, she never stopped seeing patients. Word had spread that she was willing to help, so she went into people’s homes, working part-time on the side to pay her own bills, seeing patients with IDs in whatever space was available. Fees were whatever families could manage, she admits. “Sometimes $5, sometimes $20, or sometimes it would be impossible to charge them anything. But they would always offer me something; a drink, a snack, something.”

A partial break came in 2019 when the Tsao Foundation offered her a platform to run a small pilot service, funded through the Agency for Integrated Care’s Tote Board Community Health Fund. This major grant initiative provides seed funding for innovative community care projects.

While Dr Chen expressed immense gratitude for the Tsao Foundation, it dawned on her that it would never be able to scale from there. She knew that if a dedicated clinic for people with IDs was going to exist properly, she was going to have to build it herself.

“I finally took the steps to establish Happee Hearts Movement as a charity and to find the funds to establish the clinic,” she says.

In 2024, IDHealth widened its scope to start seeing residents with IDs living in adult disability homes. This year, Dr Chen is helming its next expansion — three new services in palliative care, dementia care and preventive health, developed in partnership with clinical and academic institutions. She is also working to build an ID practitioner course for medical students, and hopes to bring more polyclinics and GPs into the fold.

Her efforts earned her The Straits Times Singaporean of the Year Award 2025, which recognises Singaporeans who have gone beyond the call of duty to improve the lives of others. 

“Success would be the day when the ecosystem is established, so that people with IDs and autism can have multiple touch points to meet their varying needs, and get quality healthcare,” she declares.

The patient journey that stuck with her

If there was a patient who encouraged her to keep going, it is Jeffrey, whom Dr Chen met in 2014. He had Down syndrome and was 40 years old when he suddenly broke from his routine, refusing to leave home for anything — not even his job at a sheltered workshop, which he had enjoyed for years, or visits to his sister. Jeffrey stayed shut in for weeks, baffling the family and caregivers around him, until the workshop referred him to Dr Chen, then still running her one-woman home-based service.

She found that his withdrawal had several causes at once, including worsening osteoarthritis and a gradual loss of confidence. Working closely with his family to address each piece in turn, she watched him improve — until, after weeks of treatment, Jeffrey packed his bag on his own and walked back out the door to work for the first time in two months.

That day, Dr Chen and Jeffrey’s family were moved to tears. Jeffrey’s breakthrough mattered so much to her that in 2025, she sought her charity board’s approval to formally mark that date — 30 July — as Happee Hearts Movement’s founding day.

“As I was struggling to find a way to make this work, Jeffrey came along and gave me the conviction that this must be done and it can be done. If there is one Jeffrey and one Jeffrey’s family, there are so many more Jeffreys and families out there,” she says.

Over the decade that followed, Dr Chen treated Jeffrey through one health crisis after another. “Our journey together was a powerful one,” she states. As Jeffrey was afraid of doctors and hospitals, his family built a shorthand around her. Whenever he needed something difficult, whether it was a hospital visit, a procedure or therapy, they would tell him that the person was Dr Chen’s friend, and he would agree to it.

Jeffrey died of pneumonia in 2024 and Dr Chen was with him near the end. Even when he was breathless and on an oxygen mask, he gave her the same brilliant smile he always wore even when things were bad.

“You can imagine it wasn’t easy for him to do that when he was so sick, but he flashed me that smile and it was almost like I felt he was saying to me: ‘You can’t help me this time, but it’s okay.’”

Dr Chen nods solemnly: “I carry that moment a lot with me.”

Dr Chen’s husband, Liam Pee, also a doctor, entered the scene at almost the exact same moment as the mission itself. They met in 2010 — the same year she went back to MINDS as a doctor — which means, as she puts it, he was “roped into this thing right from the start.” Her team now half-jokingly calls him the very first Happee Hearts Movement volunteer, a title he has kept up ever since.

Dr Pee works in emergency medicine but when it comes to the Happee Hearts Movement, the division of labour has always been instinctive. At health screenings, she saw patients while he ran operations — coordinating volunteers, managing logistics, and smoothing over anyone who was frustrated or waiting too long. Whenever she hits a setback, he is the first person she turns to. 

Dr Chen is refreshingly honest about what her life mission to help people with IDs has cost the people closest to her. “The people who have made the most sacrifices for me to pursue this mission are my family,” she says pensively.  “I feel sorry for the times I couldn’t be there enough for them and a lot of gratitude towards them. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do at all.”

The couple have a 10-year-old son, who has effectively grown up inside the Happee Hearts Movement. When he was younger and there was no one to look after him, Dr Chen would bring him along on home visits. Being raised around a household mission has given their son an urge to find his own. He knows, in his own words, that “Mummy has a mission” and “Daddy has a mission”, and has started asking his parents what his mission is. 

“We will always tell him, ‘In God’s time and God will reveal it to you,’” she says. 

Faith runs underneath much of how Dr Chen, a devout Catholic, stays grounded. She believes that, as well as her family and her patients, keep her from burning out under a workload that seems never-ending. At present, she is involved in clinical care, team management, grant writing, government liaison, teaching, board memberships for other charities and to top of all of it, a part-time PhD in ID healthcare.

Dr Chen pauses when reflecting on what she has given up to lead her life now. There has been a slow accumulation of smaller surrenders: the conventional idea of what a flourishing medical career looks like, the comfort of certainty and the instinct to control outcomes.

“I have to cope with being close to suffering and let go of being certain of outcomes,” she sums up. “I have to be okay with uncertainty. In fact, control is a fallacy in this life.”

ART DIRECTION Ray Ticsay
HAIR & MAKEUP Benedict Choo