At ECI, our diverse team of Adult Educators, Facilitators, Coaches, Consultants of different background including architecture, counselling, healthcare, hospitality and psychology offer a unique blend of solutions to support organisations and individuals in elevating health, happiness and productivity in the workplace.

Management

Ms Tan Susan

Founder and Principal Consultant

About Susan

Believing in the power of mental wellness to create a happier world, Ms Tan Susan founded ECI based on her Vision of Happy Individuals, Healthy Corporations, Happy Society. Susan understands that knowing does not equate to doing from experiences in human capital development consulting, coaching and health promotion since 2001. She empowers more than 26,000 individuals in the workplace to ‘work happy’ and live well by identifying their purpose and strengths, and to grow and achieve their goals with mindfulness using their strengths and good health.

A highly versatile master health coach, dynamic process facilitator and inspiring public speaker as a result of her diverse technical qualifications coupled with more than 2 decades of experience in public health and health promotion, training and curriculum development, coaching, leadership development, customer service, business operations and process improvement, she is able to nimbly customise contents and sessions to meet the diverse learning needs of her clients – over 1000 customised curriculum, courseware, training and health coaching programmes. Hence, reputable and established organisations in the public sector, the SMEs and MNCs as well as community organisations have been working with her to optimise their environment to elevate happiness and health in the workplace.

Her thirst for education is as big as her thirst for happiness and health. She has spent years lecturing in healthcare and health coaching at Asia’s Leading Medical School, National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Nanyang Technological University, School of Social Sciences. She is also the President of the Society of Behavioural Health Singapore, and she sits on the Advisory Board of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Clinic (collaboration between the Centre of Health Longevity and Alexandra Hospital. In December 2020, she published her second book – DIY Happiness Toolkit: Your Practical Guide for a Happier Life in the New Normal. This book focuses on mental wellbeing, presenting evidenced-based strategies to happiness including her belief in the 10-20-70 rule for a happy and healthy life.

#workhappy #purpose #resiliencecoaching #mentalwellbeing #empowerment #mindfulness #preventivehealth #healthcoaching #activeageing #activeaging

Preventive Health and Wellbeing

Susan is a State-Registered Nurse who is trained in pedagogy and mindfulness and has done consultative coaching projects with various healthcare and eldercare establishments including Singapore Health Promotion Board, Singapore Health Services (SingHealth), Institute of Mental Health, KK Children and Women Hospital, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Tsao Foundation, NTUC Health and Centre for Seniors (CFS). Accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experiences in 2 core areas: Health Promotion and Gerontology, Susan has been collaborating with Health Promotion Board (Singapore) for over a decade on numerous projects in areas ranging from smoking cessation, weight control, healthy ageing to healthy lifestyle adoption. These projects include one-on-one health coaching, workplace health promotion solutions, and community empowerment programmes including providing value-added advice for the design of the interactive mobile app.

Seeing health promotion, health education and preventive health in a different light, she offers her words of wisdom:

“Knowledge does not equate to practice”

2. “Without practice, success is remote no matter how much one knows”

Telling the public about what they need to do to enhance their health has not really delivered a sustainable positive outcome. From years of doing health coaching, health promotion and public health, she understands that personal responsibility and commitment are crucial to driving sustainable changes to enhance one’s health. This led her to develop her EASY with SUSAN Health Coaching framework to make it easy for individuals to make sustainable lifestyle changes for better health outcomes.

In addition, without a clear purpose and meaning in life, individuals may not be motivated to improve their health outcomes. Tapping on her wealth of knowledge and insights on happiness, meaning and purpose, health coaching and motivational interviewing, she develops a total wellness promoting curriculum in 2016. Her purpose is to equip participants with knowledge and skills to improve their physical wellbeing, and more importantly, their mental, social and spiritual wellbeing which are often lacking in many of the current health promotion programmes. Feedback has been very positive from participants since Day One that the Ministry of Health has been sending its employees with monthly classes scheduled from 2016 to 2020. The Public Service Division upon sending officers from different agencies to evaluate the programme was also convinced that this program would help its public officers to stay positive and navigate the changes and disruptions in the workplace. Different ministries and statutory boards have also been sending their employees since 2019 with monthly classes scheduled in 2023.

Gerontology

Passionate about enhancing the quality of life for seniors, Susan has done a lot of work to educate individuals and businesses on gerontology and senior caregiving skills, including:

Jointly developing the Age-friendly Guide for Outpatient Centres with renowned environmental gerontologist Dr Emi Kiyota and Tsao Foundation. In conjunction with the Guide, she trained hundreds of employees of a local healthcare institution on understanding ageing and its corresponding issues; as well as coached its supervisory staff in implementing age-friendly initiatives within the organisation.
Designing more than 20 competency-based curricula and conducting training to prepare individuals for work in the Senior Services sector. An example would be the programme funded by Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) which Susan designed, and subsequently trained, assessed and coached numerous domestic helpers and caregivers on essential caregiving skills. Employers of these domestic helpers liked the programme so much that they were sending their replacement helpers to the same programme.
To make the world more inclusive for people living with dementia, in 2014, Susan collaborated with Dr Allen Power and Dr Emi Kiyota to design an experiential training programme on dementia. This programme enables participants to experience living with dementia, thereby, heightening their empathy for people with dementia.
Susan also created a website to empower the community with knowledge and skills to care for and live well with dementia (www.dementiahelp.sg) published a book on preventing dementia – Add MEANINGS To Your Life Every Day: Keep Dementia At Bay. MEANINGS, each alphabet represents an evidence-based strategy to prevent dementia.

#QualityofLife #Gerontology #dementia

Leadership and Service

In the area of customer service, Susan possesses extensive front-line experience both at the operational level as well as at the leadership level. Susan honed her basic customer service skills by serving clients from all walks of life. At the leadership level, she was often called upon by her team members for complaint management and service recovery as well as service process planning and evaluation and service team coaching.

In addition, Susan was one of the few facilitators in Singapore to be selected by Disney Institute (the professional development arm of The Walt Disney Company) to conduct Disney-powered WSQ Service Excellence programmes offered by NextU.

Qualification

Susan received her Masters of Arts in Lifelong Learning from the University of London (Institute of Education), a Bachelor of Science in Business and Management Studies from the University of Bradford, and a Diploma in Nursing from Nanyang Polytechnic (Singapore). Additionally, she holds an Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment (ACTA), a Diploma in Adult and Continuing Education (DACE), American Council on Exercise ACE certification in Personal Training. She is the President of the Society of Behavioural Health Singapore and an UKIHCA-Approved Affiliate Member.

Professional Bodies Affiliation

Been Featured

Visiting Consultant

Dr Emi Kiyota

Environmental Gerontologist and organizational culture change specialist

Dr Emi Kiyota, an Environmental Gerontologist and organizational culture change specialist, currently serves as Director (Programmes), Health District @ Queenstown at National University of Singapore, as well as an Associate Professor, NUS Yong Loo in School of Medicine and College of Design and Engineering. She is also a visiting consultant to implement person-centered care practice in long term care facilities. Having published journal articles and book chapters in Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States, Emi has done pre-design programming for senior housing and addiction treatment centers in the United States and abroad.

In addition to making a vast array of contributions to national and international initiatives focused on quality improvement in the built environment for long-term care and aging services, Emi holds great concern for the needs of elders in the developing world. Over the past several years, Emi has dedicated her energies to developing ageing valued community projects in Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Ivory Coast. To this end, Emi has formed Ibasho, embodying the Japanese concept of “a place where one feels at home being one’s self” with a group of like-minded colleagues.

A frequent speaker and lecturer at local and international venues to audiences of both academics and practitioners alike, Emi received her Ph.D. in Architecture (Environment and Behavior Studies) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as her Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Horticulture Therapy from Kansas State University.

.

Associate Consultant

Ms Debra Mok-Chan

Ms Debra Mok-Chan has more than 15 years of experience in project and programme management in a non-profit environment. She has a proven record in transmitting clients’ vision into reality and mission into action plans through focused strategy/policy development, successful mobilisation of resources, and efficient people management.

Her work within the eldercare sector includes providing counselling and case management in her earlier years at voluntary welfare organisations; curriculum development and training at TSAO Foundation, putting to good use her Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment (ACTA) certification; conceptualising and implementing mental health programmes for older persons on a national level under the Health Promotion Board; and conceptualising and implementing a Place-and-Train programme for the eldercare sector’s senior care associates as commissioned by the Ministry of Health in collaboration with NTUC Eldercare (now re-branded as NTUC Health).

More recently, Debra set up a suite of eldercare services at the Methodist Welfare Services, inclusive of a successful bid with the Ministry of Health for a Build-Own-Lease Nursing Home, successful bids with the Ministry of Social and Family Development for a suite of Senior Activity Centres serving Studio Apartments, and the development and implementation of a full Home Care programme through close collaboration with the Ministry of Health.

Debra holds a Bachelor of Psychology from Murdoch University, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Social Work from the National University of Singapore and a Masters of Gerontology from Latrobe University.