Dr Fadzil graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the National University of Singapore in 2005. He obtained his Masters in Sports Medicine at the University of Queensland, Australia in 2013. He currently practises at the Department of Sport and Exercise Medicine in Changi General Hospital (CGH) and is the operational lead for Singapore Sport and Exercise Medicine Centre at Singapore General Hospital (SGH). He also looks after the health of our elite national athletes at the Singapore Sports Institute (SSI).
In 2018, SingHealth established the SingHealth Duke-NUS Sport & Exercise Medicine Centre (SDSC), which aims to provide integrated, multidisciplinary care that pushes the frontiers of clinical service, research and education in the field of Sport and Exercise Medicine (SEM) across all SingHealth institutions and Dr Fadzil has been appointed as the Community Director for SDSC. In addition he is also the Director of Community Programmes for Exercise Is Medicine Singapore (EIMS), a global initiative by the American College of Sports Medicine and also serves as the Deputy Director of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, for SingHealth Office of Regional Health.
Dr Fadzil is actively involved in many community programmes and grassroots activities. He currently works closely with Sport Singapore’s ActiveSG team in the Active Health initiative by providing medical and exercise prescription expertise. Since the declaration of ‘War on Diabetes’, he has been working closely with the Ministry of Health (MOH), community partners and government organisations like Health Promotion Board (HPB), People’s Association (PA) and Community Development Council (CDC). He has co-developed the Health Peers Programme, in which he leads a team of health professionals to train community volunteers in diabetes prevention and management. The Health Peers Programme was awarded the Prime Minister’s Community Initiative Award 2017 and has also earned Changi General Hospital the Community Partnership Excellence Award at the People’s Association Community Awards Ceremony in 2018.
Dr Fadzil is a member of the Tampines Central Citizen’s Consultative Committee, focusing on both health and physical activity promotion in the community as well as outreach to the youths and minorities through sports and exercise. He also serves as the healthcare lead for 2 M³ towns, ie. M³@Bedok and M³@Tampines and is also the chairperson for the physical activity subcommittee under the Ministry of Health-Health Promotion Board Malay Community Outreach (MCO). His passion in promoting health and physical activity, as well as supporting citizen-centric and last mile service delivery for the underserved and underprivileged in the community is further exemplified in his active role as board members of the Yellow Ribbon Singapore (YRSG), the Muslim Trust Fund Association (MTFA) Dialysis Centre and PSB Academy's Science Industry Advisory Panel. As such, Dr Fadzil has been invited as both speaker and guest in many public health talks and community events, both locally and internationally, as well as being quoted in various media resources.
The world is currently confronted with two pandemics occurring at the same time: COVID-19 and physical inactivity/sedentary behaviour. As governments worldwide introduced measures to contain the infection and reduce the number of new cases to safeguard the capacity of the local healthcare services, many opportunities to be physically active have been suspended. COVID-19 is making the world move even less than before. The changes in our daily lives as a result of COVID-19 has the potential to further impact and accelerate the physical inactivity pandemic we have been confronted with, and failing to address, for many years.
We will eventually recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and normal activities will resume but the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will not be fully realized for some time. We must therefore take this opportunity to learn valuable lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic; in particular, how aggressively the world altered societal norms to decrease the spread of this viral infection. Perhaps a similar aggressiveness is needed to treat the physical inactivity pandemic and efforts must be taken to get people physically moving again in order to improve health outcomes under normal conditions and improve humankind's resiliency during future pandemics.
