Choosing a Paediatrician in Singapore: Three Routes

Your baby’s routine care in Singapore runs on three routes: a polyclinic, a GP clinic on the Community Health Assist Scheme, or a private paediatrician. The route decides what the jabs and screenings cost.

At a Community Health Assist Scheme GP clinic, which is a private GP clinic the Government subsidises and everyone calls a CHAS GP, the nationally recommended childhood jabs and the seven childhood developmental screenings carry a patient fee cap of S$0 for an eligible Singapore Citizen child. At a polyclinic, the Ministry of Health says eligible citizen and permanent resident children may receive up to full subsidies, and asks you to check with the clinic. At a private paediatrician you pay the clinic’s own fee (as of September 2026).

Whichever route you pick, you can check the doctor yourself in about a minute. The Singapore Medical Council runs a public search of registered doctors, and its form filters by Specialist and by specialty. Paediatric Medicine is one of the specialties on that list.

It is three routes, not two

The Ministry of Health’s own page on childhood screening and vaccination subsidies names a third setting alongside the polyclinic: a CHAS GP clinic, which may well be the family doctor you already see.

Neither subsidy needs an application. The Ministry’s page says so in one line, under a heading that asks the question.

What a private paediatrician buys you is one named doctor. You book with that person, and the same person can see your baby at two months and at two years. A polyclinic is an institution.

A CHAS GP clinic sits in between: a named family doctor, at the subsidised fee cap, without the paediatric specialty. That trade is the real decision here, and it is worth making on purpose.

What the jab schedule decides for you

How often you see a doctor in the first two years is mostly not your decision. It is set by the National Childhood Immunisation Schedule, which is the list of childhood vaccinations Singapore recommends as the standard of care.

The schedule covers vaccinations against 14 diseases: tuberculosis, hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliovirus, Haemophilus influenzae type b, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (chickenpox), pneumococcal disease, human papillomavirus and influenza. Of those, vaccinations against measles and diphtheria are compulsory for children under the Infectious Diseases Act. The rest are recommended.

The schedule’s own table runs in columns, and those columns are your appointment rhythm: birth, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 12 months, 15 months, 18 months, then 2 to 4 years, and then school ages. Hepatitis B shows how the doses cluster.

The schedule’s footnote recommends its doses 2 and 3 as part of the 6-in-1 vaccine at 2 and 6 months, so one appointment covers several jabs. The early visits are dense, then they thin out.

Our guide to mandatory immunisations for newborns in Singapore walks through the vaccines themselves. For the dose-by-dose table, go to the agency’s own vaccinations page, which carries the full schedule and the date it was last updated.

How to check a doctor really is a registered paediatrician

Being a paediatrician here is a registered status. Before a doctor practises as a specialist in Singapore, the Singapore Medical Council says they must obtain specialist accreditation from the Specialists Accreditation Board and submit an application to the Council to add their name to the Register of Specialists. Two approvals from two bodies, and the Council’s own page sets out both.

The public search is where you see the result. It sits on the Council’s site under “Search for registered doctors”, and the Ministry of Health’s Health Professionals Portal links the same tool from its list of searches for doctors, dentists, pharmacists and nurses.

1. Open the Singapore Medical Council’s page for the public and follow “Search for registered doctors”.
2. Tick the box confirming you have read and agreed to the terms of use for the search.
3. Enter the doctor’s full name as the clinic’s own website spells it. The form also takes a registration number, which is optional.
4. Set Place to Specialist, then open More Search Options and pick Paediatric Medicine from the specialties list. Paediatric Surgery is a separate specialty, and five sub-specialties named Paediatric sit further down the same list, with Neonatology beside them. Pick the one the clinic claims.

Two things this check will not do. It will not tell you whether a doctor is any good with a frightened toddler, and it will not price the consultation. It settles one question: whether the qualification on the wall is the one the regulator recognises.

The paediatrician the hospital gave you

Many parents meet their baby’s first paediatrician without choosing them, then assume that is settled. It is not.

IMC Medical Clinic, a private clinic that publishes a patient guide to having a baby in Singapore, sets out how it generally works: in public hospitals a paediatrician is assigned “depending on who is covering the deliveries on the day”, and in private hospitals you nominate one to attend the delivery and check the baby. Its guide adds the part nobody says out loud. After you and your baby are discharged, “you can choose any paediatrician to monitor your babies health”, and you are not obliged to stay with whoever attended the birth.

That is IMC’s own description of how the system generally works. Treat it as the shape of the thing and confirm the detail with your hospital. The practical move it points at holds either way.

If you are still pregnant and going private, ask your obstetrician which paediatrician they work with and whether that doctor covers the hospital you are booked into. If you have already been discharged, nothing stops you starting somewhere else next month.

What it costs, and what MediSave covers

The subsidy attaches to the setting, not to the vaccine. At a CHAS GP clinic the patient fee cap for each listed childhood vaccine and for the developmental screening is S$0 for an eligible Singapore Citizen child. At a polyclinic, eligible citizen and permanent resident children may receive up to full subsidies.

The Ministry’s table is dated from 1 September 2025 and the page says it is subject to periodic changes, so check the current version before you budget (as of September 2026).

MediSave is the other lever, and it works differently. The subsidies above reduce what the clinic charges you. MediSave is your own savings account, and it pays a bill you have already been charged.

Childhood vaccinations under the National Childhood Immunisation Schedule are on the Ministry’s list of outpatient treatments MediSave can be used for, inside the yearly MediSave500 or MediSave700 limit. That limit is up to S$500 per patient a year, or up to S$700 for patients with complex chronic conditions (as of September 2026).

There is also money already sitting there. The MediSave Grant for Newborns was raised from S$4,000 to S$5,000 for every Singapore Citizen newborn born from 1 April 2025, which the Ministry described as further help to offset the medical expenses of Singaporean children.

For a private paediatrician, the honest answer is that there is no single published figure. Clinics set their own consultation fees, and the Ministry’s subsidy page does not reach them. Ask for the consultation fee and the vaccine fee separately when you book, because the second is often the larger of the two.

Why the choice looks like this at all

Singapore’s child development care is young enough to have named founders, and one of them explains much of what a parent meets today.

Dr Ho Lai Yun was the founding Head of the Department of Neonatology at Singapore General Hospital from 1986 to 2004. In 1991 he opened the Development Assessment Clinic there, and in 1997 it became the Child Development Unit at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital. Two of Singapore’s four national neonatal screening programmes were started by him, including the Universal Neonatal Hearing Screening.

That history is the shape of the system you are choosing inside. The free developmental screening, the child development unit that grew out of one clinic at Singapore General Hospital, the newborn hearing screen: this is a young system with named founders, and Dr Ho is one of them. The doctor you pick is one door into it.

Before the first appointment

Pick the route first and the doctor second. If money is the binding constraint, a CHAS GP clinic gives an eligible citizen child the jabs and the screenings at a S$0 fee cap, at an ordinary GP clinic rather than a specialist appointment. If having one named specialist matters more, that is what a private paediatrician is, and the subsidy still follows the setting, so a jab can still be done at a polyclinic or a CHAS GP.

Then do the one-minute check. Put the doctor’s name through the Singapore Medical Council’s search, set Place to Specialist and the specialty to Paediatric Medicine, and do it before you sit in the waiting room. If the baby has not arrived yet, our newborn guide to your first 12 weeks in Singapore covers the rest of the first three months, and the newborn section has the paperwork nobody warns you about.

Wei Chun

Founder & Editor

A Singapore parent writing the guide he wished he'd had — practical, calm, and grounded in what actually works.

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