Dr Ong Peck Leong, Emeritus Consultant, Neurosurgery, has received the NNI 50 Years Long Service Awards. Here he shares highlights from his career and offers sage advice to aspiring neurosurgeons.
When Dr Ong Peck Leong was preparing to leave school in the 1960s, he was thinking of becoming an engineer to help develop Singapore post-independence, but a chance encounter at the library changed his mind.
“I took a book off the shelf that I thought was about engineering, but it was actually about Medicine. I read it anyway, and I soon realised I wanted to be a doctor instead,” remembers Dr Ong, Emeritus Consultant, Neurosurgery, NNI.
After graduating from the then University of Singapore, Dr Ong did his Medicine Housemanship at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) before rotating to the former Thompson Road General Hospital for his Surgical Housemanship in 1972.
During that time, Dr Tham Cheok Fai, the ‘father of Singapore Neurosurgery,’ spent Tuesdays operating and running clinics at the hospital.
“The first time I walked into his operation room, Dr Tham was surprised to see me, but he didn’t tell me to leave,” recalls Dr Ong. “The patient had a suspected brain tumour and needed to undergo a ventriculogram to confirm its location. We brought him to the Radiology Department, but back then, CT scans or MRI didn’t exist, so a team of us had to turn the patient 360 degrees to get the air to fill all the ventricles and show us the location of the tumour.”
By the end of the day, Dr Ong knew he had found his calling. He joined Dr Tham as a trainee and followed Dr Tham when the Neuroscience Department was set up at TTSH in 1973. Two years later, Dr Ong went to Perth, Australia for specialist training and on his return in 1977, he became Singapore’s fourth neurosurgeon.
At that time, team-based care and intensive care specialists did not exist, so work was demanding for the young neurosurgeon and his colleagues.
“It was just the consultant and a medical officer. We had to do everything, from operating and clinics to running neuro-intensive care and infection control. With being on-call once every four days and long operations that could last into the night, my office chair became my second bed!” he recalls.
Dr Ong was head of Neurosurgery, 1985 to 2000, first at TTSH, then at NNI when it was formed in 1999.
His priority during his leadership was to get accreditation from the Royal College of Surgeons to establish the department as a training centre and to increase the number of neurosurgeons. Dr Ong was known to run a ‘tight ship’ and to be strict with trainees.
“There is no room for error when operating on the brain. It needs to be right the first time, all the time, because there are no second chances,” he explains unapologetically.
As the pool of neurosurgeons grew, Dr Ong wanted to deepen their knowledge and expertise, so he directed the team to focus on specific areas of care, such as brain tumours, neurovascular and functional neurosurgery, e.g. deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease.
Dr Ong focused on brain tumours. Over the years he has treated thousands of patients, but he remembers one particularly well.
“The lady had a vascular meningioma, a tumour on the membrane that covers the brain and was supplied by lots of blood vessels. Once we started surgery to remove the tumour, we couldn’t stop because there was severe bleeding. We started in the morning and operated until we ended at lunchtime the following day. It was exhausting but deeply satisfying when the patient woke up with no complications.”
Dr Ong stopped operating when he turned 65 years old. Today the 78 year-old continues to work part-time, running clinics and planning radiotherapy for brain tumours.
So, what advice does he have for young doctors considering neurosurgery?
“Be genuinely interested in neuroscience and be able to dedicate your life to the profession, because the specialty requires long hours. Don’t do it just for the money, because there are easier ways to make a good living!” Dr Ong advises wryly.
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