23 OCT 2026 — Singapore's separate community mental health teams will be folded into one network called HealthierMind SG, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said on 22 October. The teams now work under different schemes, targets and names. Addressing a family therapy conference that also marked the Counselling and Care Centre's 60th anniversary, Ong said the Ministry of Health (MOH) would move them onto a single framework, with one set of funding rules and performance indicators, over "the coming months".
The announcement came in a speech that also extended a school health programme to lower secondary students and promised guidelines on when parents must be told that a young person has sought help. MOH will carry out the transition with the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) and the community organisations that run the services.
Four teams, four sets of rules
Ong described a system that grew in pieces. People with early symptoms are served by CREST teams, and those with moderate conditions by the Community Intervention Team, or COMIT. Young people have their own versions, CREST-Youth and the Youth Integrated Teams. Public hospitals, the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) among them, run community services of their own as well.
"So we have many teams going around doing the same thing, very well intentioned, doing good work," Ong said. The problem, as he described it, is that each service supports a different level and group, and the community organisations running them must satisfy several schemes at once, each with its own key performance indicators.
"We need to press the reset button, and rearrange and reconfigure the current arrangements," he said. The names COMIT, YIT and CREST will go. The new name is meant to sit alongside Healthier SG, which enrols people with polyclinics and GP clinics, and Age Well SG, which covers seniors.
What changes for funding
Ong said funding under the new framework should be steadier, with a baseline large enough for organisations to hold on to and grow their mental health capabilities. It will also reward work that improves access and outcomes. He gave no sum, no start date and no list of which providers will be included. Whether the hospital-run community services join the network was not spelt out.
He gave one example of how referrals could change. Today, schools must send every case needing extra mental health support to a public hospital such as IMH. Under a triage model, milder cases and those with early symptoms would go to community organisations instead.
Schools as the youth centres
The second strand starts in classrooms. Some social service agencies had asked whether young people should get dedicated centres, as seniors have Active Ageing Centres. "I said, we have a lot of youth centres and they are called schools," Ong recalled.
Grow Well SG, already running for preschool and primary pupils, will be extended to Secondary One and Two by MOH together with the education and social and family development ministries. Each student will draw up a personalised health plan with healthcare professionals. At secondary level the plan will focus on resilience and on talking openly about mental health. Ong said more details would follow.
Consent and the fear of a record
Ong returned to two themes from his World Mental Health Day message of 10 October, stigma and parental consent. In that message he said youths seen by community services had more than doubled, and that IMH is to take a new name in 2027, the National Centre for Mental Health Singapore.
Practice on consent varies between the mindline helpline, schools, community services and hospitals, he said on Thursday, and MOH is drafting cross-sector guidelines that will go to public consultation. "A young person stepping forward to seek help should not have to worry that their parents would somehow be automatically and immediately informed," Ong said, while adding that parents would usually need to be involved as care went on.
On records, he said public agencies do not ask job applicants about mental health unless the role demands it, and that medical and counselling records will not be used against young people in school or work. He pointed to the Workplace Fairness Act, which bars employment decisions based on mental health conditions without a genuine job-related reason. The Tripartite Alliance, which runs the employer guidance, says the Act is slated to take effect at the end of 2027.
A larger role for family doctors
The fourth item concerns general practitioners. Last year MOH brought in Healthier SG care protocols to help GPs treat major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder, and has paired Healthier SG clinics with community mental health providers. Ong said GPs would take on more over time, as they do in Australia and the United Kingdom, without giving a timetable.
What is still missing
The speech set a direction rather than a budget. MOH has not published a press release on HealthierMind SG, and the speech gives no funding figures or detailed timeline. The consent guidelines have yet to be released for consultation. For the organisations running CREST and COMIT today, the details that matter most are still to come from MOH and AIC: baseline funding, the new indicators and the date the old schemes end.
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