Gleneagles’ little-known journey from hotel to nursing home to hospital

SINGAPORE - When Dr See Tho Kai Yin moved his obstetrics and gynaecology practice to Gleneagles Hospital in 1978, the hospital seemed to him like a nursing home. He was not far off.

It was not yet a multidisciplinary hospital and had only basic healthcare services and facilities.

“There were maybe obstetrics, general surgery and a bit of gynaecology. There wasn’t anything for cancers, radiotherapy or anything of that sort,” Dr See Tho, 79, told The Straits Times as the hospital marked its 65th anniversary on June 7.

As part of the celebrations, it unveiled its own orchid, the Brassocattleya Gleneagles, a hybrid of the brassavola and cattleya orchids.

Today, the hospital stands on the site of the former Gleneagles Nursing Home and Gleneagles Hotel. It has 221 beds across three blocks, with more than 500 multidisciplinary specialists and nearly 1,200 full-time members of staff.

It has also expanded abroad, growing to 13 hospitals and two clinics in Malaysia, India, Hong Kong and Brunei.

In 1957, it was converted from a hotel, opposite the Singapore Botanic Gardens, into a humble 45-bed nursing home run by the British.

Two years later, it began operation as the first private hospital in the Orchard area.

Over time, the hospital started offering more specialised services, said Dr See Tho, who retired recently.

“As medical practice improved, the hospital also needed to increase its facilities,” he noted.

Healthcare became more specialised from the 1990s, and the turn of the century saw an influx of specialists into private practice, he added.

In 1993, Gleneagles became a tertiary care hospital. A year later, it had 150 specialists.

In 2013, Dr See Tho’s daughter, Dr See Tho Ving Yuen, 51, made her foray into private practice, joining the hospital as an anaesthesiologist about three decades after her father.

The father and daughter have worked together in joint surgical procedures, where she administers anaesthesia for things like caesarean sections and operations to remove ovarian cysts or fibroids.

For Dr See Tho Ving Yuen, who has her own clinic, the ease of communication when working with her father helps them work as a team.

Retired doctor, Dr See Tho Kai Yin and his daughter, Dr See Tho Ving Yuen, an anaesthesiologist of Gleneagles Hospital, on June 11, 2024.  ST PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG

A good rapport between a surgeon and an anaesthetist makes working together easy, her father added. “Of course, it is much easier because she is my daughter.”

The hospital has come a long way from its colonial days.

It began as a house that occupied the site of Harvestehude, named after a quarter in the German city of Hamburg, which was built in the early 1900s by a German resident called Gustav C. W. Wolber.

In the late 1930s, two British women took over the building and converted it into a boarding house. They renamed it Gleneagles after a valley in Scotland.

The name Gleneagles is believed to mean “glen of the church”, composed of the word glen, which means valley, and the French word for church, eglise.

In the 1950s, a six-storey luxury hotel, The Gleneagles Hotel, was built beside the Harvestehude building.

Gleneagles Hotel in Napier Road on January 31, 1958. ST PHOTO: LEE TUCK SOON

It was converted into Gleneagles Nursing Home in 1957, while the former Harvestehude building became staff quarters and was renamed Macauley House in 1958, a year before Gleneagles Hospital was established.

Healthcare group IHH Healthcare acquired the hospital in 1987 and expanded its premises and services to include a new 10-storey hospital block, 14 operating theatres and 150 consulting suites, alongside hospital management and consultancy services.

After becoming a tertiary hospital in 1993, it became the first hospital in South-east Asia to perform a living donor liver transplant for children in 2002.

Today, the hospital stands on the site of the former Gleneagles Nursing Home and Gleneagles Hotel. ST PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG

Nurse manager Ng Kim Leng, 68, who joined the hospital 42 years ago, remembers it being much smaller than what it is today, with only two blocks and around 300 members of staff.

Ms Ng was among the second batch of nurses from the hospital trained in abortion counselling in the late 1990s.

She recalls how an expectant mother she counselled decided to keep the baby after she helped her consider alternative options and seek financial support from her family.

Nurse manager Ng Kim Leng, 68, who joined the hospital 42 years ago, remembers it being much smaller than what it is today, with only two blocks and around 300 staff members.  ST PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG

“I felt (a) sense of joy that a life had been saved,” said Ms Ng.

Plans to expand and upgrade the hospital are in the pipeline, said chief executive officer Thomas Wee.

He said that the hospital aims to raise its capacity “to improve (its) ability to cater to a higher patient load”.

On its plans to increase occupancy, the hospital declined to comment, saying only that planning is in the early stages.

Maternity care units stationed on different floors, including the maternity ward, labour ward and neonatal intensive care unit, will be relocated to one floor by the early part of the fourth quarter of 2024, said Mr Wee.

This will help to streamline maternity services and provide a “one-stop shop for mothers”, he said.

In June, the hospital pioneered the use of a system, DermaPace, that treats leg ulcers by stimulating blood flow, and is the first hospital in South-east Asia to do so, he added.