“Many people have different things that keep them going. For me, I draw a lot of strength from spirituality and my faith. Patients also are one of my biggest inspirations. When you do a good surgery and the patient passes you words of appreciation – that itself adds motivation to what you do.”

“…Gone are the days where we just do medicine and nothing else. We need outlets outside of medicine to express ourselves and an avenue for us to de-stress and de-role. At the end of the day, my personal goal in life is really just to be the best version of myself, and in doing so, improving the lives of others if I could.

So in that spirit, I do believe that doing what you can with what you have, where you are, is the best thing that you can do. You don’t have to travel far and wide to do good. We just need to do certain things from where we are. We can think big, but we can start small, and you know if you have passion, it will eventually pave the way for you.

“…HealthServe is another organization I volunteer with to serve the migrant worker population in Singapore. It really started out very fortuitously because I was asked to volunteer by an anaesthetist who was in the operating theatre with me.”

“This is definitely a population that can be served better, and to me that emotional attachment to them stems from the fact that my great grandfather was once a migrant worker in Singapore, and if he wasn’t treated well by our country at the time, I wouldn’t be here today. I think there’s a lot more that can be done to integrate our migrant worker community and to provide them with their basic needs in healthcare and other areas.”

Excerpts from an article by Gheslynn Gerard and Phoebe Aw Yue. This piece first appeared on Humans of Medicine YLL (@humansofmedyll), an Instagram page by NUS Medical Society from Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

If you would like to step forward as a volunteer like Dr Hamid, visit https://hs.yipl.com.np/volunteer/