Adjunct Professor Shirley Ooi is a Senior Consultant at the Emergency Medicine Department (EMD) and the Medical Clinical Education Lead/Associate Dean at the National University Hospital (NUH). An Adjunct Professor at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, she is also the inaugural Director of the National University Health System (NUHS) Early Career Guidance Centre. She is the Deputy Chairperson of the Joint Committee on Specialist Training (JCST) Accreditation Committee and a member of the Emergency Medicine national examination committee.
A former ASEAN Pre-University Scholar from Penang, Malaysia and Singapore Public Service Commission Local Merit Scholarship holder for Medicine at NUS, Adj Prof Ooi obtained her FRCSEd (A&E) in 1992 and became a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore in 1998. She has worked in Edinburgh, UK in 1992 and did a Trauma Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, USA (Oct 1996-June 1997). She was the former Chief of the EMD NUH (2006-2010) and the inaugural Designated Institutional Official of the NUHS Residency programme (2009-2020). She has served in numerous national and international clinical training committees, including chairing the Emergency Medicine Specialist Training Committee (2009-2011), a member of the Specialist Accreditation Board (2010-2020) and ACGME-I review committee (2020-2026).
A much sought-after speaker at many local and international conferences and an external examiner at the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia since 2024, Adj Prof Ooi whose passion is in teaching, mentoring and coaching, believes in life-long learning. As such, she completed her Masters of Health Professions Education (MHPE-S) offered by Maastricht University, Netherlands and the Academy of Medicine, Singapore, in 2017, the Newfield Ontological Coaching programme in 2021, and is currently an Associate Certified Coach with the international Coaching Federation. She also completed the Newfield team coaching programme in 2022, coaching.com Imposter Coaching programme in 2025 and Burnout Coaching Certification programme in 2026.
She has won multiple teaching and mentoring awards, the two most prestigious being the 2013 National Outstanding Clinician Educator award for her “outstanding and immense contribution in nurturing and shaping future medical leaders, and the development of the field of Emergency Medicine education in Singapore”, and the 2019 ACGME-I Physician Leader award. She has been involved in teaching Evidence-based Medicine since 1997.
Her clinical research interest is in Emergency Cardiac Care, especially in studies dealing with the diagnosis of acute coronary syndromes using cardiac biomarkers and electrocardiogram. For the above, she won the 1997 American College of Emergency Physician Research Forum Young Investigator Award. She won the National Medical Excellence Team Award in 2011 for reducing median door-to-door balloon time for ST elevation myocardial infarction patients presenting at the EMD. Her medical education research interests are in effective clinical teaching and learning strategies and issues dealing with burnout. She has written 4 books entitled “Guide to the Essentials in Emergency Medicine 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions” and “Medicolegal Issues in Emergency Medicine and Family Practice: Case Scenarios”.
