Modelling the Dynamics of HIV/AIDS Population in Singapore

Abstract

This paper aims to model and improve the HIV/AIDS management in Singapore. Though a lot has already been done for the HIV/AIDS patients in Singapore by both government and non-government organisations, more can be done to assist the patients suffering from HIV/AIDS. This project focuses on using Systems Thinking and Systems Dynamics to alleviate the problem by implementing solutions which will benefit HIV/AIDS patients. The main policies to be considered include Prevention, Early Detection and Enabling a Normal Lifestyle. The prevention policy would act as an upstream policy to reduce the number of new HIV/AIDS infections while detection and enabling policy would seek to allow as many patients to go through proper screening and treatment. Each policy has a different target group. The prevention policy targets the healthy population while the detection and enabling policy targets the undiscovered infected population and discovered infected population respectively. A model was developed to replicate and project the HIV/AIDS situation in Singapore. Upon the validation of the model, the policies were implemented individually to project the effectiveness of each policy. It was concluded that a simultaneous implementation of all three policies would be the most effective to cater to all the different stockholders.