Interview with the 2016 Young Executive of the Year Award Recipient

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Mr Chew Wei Kean is the recipient of the coveted Young Executive of the Year 2016 Award presented by the Singapore Retailers Association (SRA). The Retail Awards honours the industry’s crème de la crème for the outstanding impact they have made on the retail scene through innovation, creativity and retail excellence.

The 29-year-old Senior Pharmacist is currently stationed at Watsons Ngee Ann City, the company’s Flagship Outlet. Creative, passionate and resourceful, he constantly strives to exceed customers’ expectations and improve operational efficiencies at Watsons.

Excellent Service

He received numerous compliments from internal and external customers. On various occasions he went the extra mile to ensure that customers get the right medicines and their healthcare needs were duly fulfilled. His exemplary performance and positive work attitude had earned him the Excellent Service Award (EXSA) Gold Award by SRA in 2015.

Telepharmacy Champion

Apart from his dispensing and patient care duties at the shop floor, Wei Kean participated actively in the Telepharmacy Workgroup and was involved in drafting of Telepharmacy Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Society of Singapore (PSS). In addition, he shared his knowledge on telehealth (telepharmacy) at National Seminar on Productivity in Healthcare and Intermediate and Long-Term Care (ILTC) Quality Festival, organised by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) on 9 October 2014. The sharing provided some insights to the public on how they can acquire pharmacy-only medicines from trained personnel if a pharmacist is not available in the pharmacy counter.

“Mr IT Pharmacist”

Wei Kean heads the Information Technology Portfolio since June 2014 and is currently overseeing 6 team members. He works closely with them to improve the productivity of Pharmacy Department and enhances the information dissemination process within the department as well as with other departments.

In September 2015, through his own initiative and self-acquired IT knowledge, Wei Kean and his team developed an in-house unified and customised Drug InfoSearch platform – WePharm. This one-stop portal allows users to search for concise information of registered medicines in Singapore with WHO ATC classification and Singapore registered pharmacies locator. With fast access to relevant information utilising least effort and time, this translates to an increased productivity to the business. He also shared his knowledge at the 26th Singapore Pharmacy Congress.

Wei Kean at the 26th Singapore Pharmacy Congress on 9th Oct 2016.

Wei Kean strongly believes in continuous learning, discovering new things, and growing. To further enhance his knowledge and skills, he is currently doing PHP MVC Codelgniter Tutorial and Learn Dymanic Web Deisgn with PHP/MySQL, AJAX, JavaScript and CSS at Udemy.

By harnessing the newly learned IT knowledge, Wei Kean has created various web platforms for different portfolios in the pharmacy department. For example, Enhanced Nursing Home Data Entry System (Nursing Home portfolio), Drug Information Service Request (Professional Development portfolio), Medication Misadventures Reporting Form (Medication Safety Portfolio) and many others.

Leader with a Heart

Wei Kean is one who loves to share his learning with his team mates. He guided his teammates whom had little knowledge about IT and humbly gathered their inputs to improve the system. Now, his teammates can assist anyone who has problem with the system, and this ensures the continuality of the platform created. With his pleasant personality and good leadership skills, he was nominated as the Best Team Player 2014 by his colleagues in Watson’s Pharmacy Department.

“We can accomplish a lot more working with other people and tapping on their strengths rather than we could alone,” said Wei Kean.

Last but not least, Kean also created a different version of platform which is accessible by the public, http://pharmfair.com. It is a HON certified website which provides fast information about medicinal products registered in Singapore, and also a retail pharmacies locator which provides the contact of all registered retail pharmacies in Singapore. He strongly believes that public should have access to these information freely.

His commitment to improving information access for the benefit of all makes him a role model to his peers, and a great asset to the pharmaceutical industry in Singapore. PSS congratulates Mr Chew on receiving for this well-deserved honour and award. Keep up the good work!