Public doctors working for the Hospital Authority are unhappy. Many have protested with their feet by joining the private sector; those remaining threaten to resign or work to rule. I am talking about the junior doctors, who work long hours on the front line and are inundated with administrative chores, as well as the rules and regulations inflicted on them by their seniors, who spend all day attending administrative meetings.
In terms of remuneration, senior doctors get paid a lot more. The problem started years ago when Chung Sze-yuen was charged with establishing the authority. To entice government doctors to join the authority, his team offered them sweeteners. In lieu of the standard civil service benefits, they were offered a cash allowance of up to 66 per cent of their basic salaries. Such calculations were flawed. Most civil service benefits are meant to last a finite period, such as 10 years for the home purchase scheme. But because of a miscalculation, many senior doctors go on receiving the cash allowance until they retire.
Staff remuneration became the authority's biggest expenditure. The budget deficit was a wake-up call.
So in 1998 and 1999, new recruits were offered contracts with much reduced pay, and this was further reduced from 2000 onwards.
While senior consultants make over HK$250,000 a month, and doctors who joined before 1998 get at least HK$113,000, those who joined from 2000 on can expect only HK$57,000 at most, and will never reach the levels of their predecessors, regardless of their future rank, experience, or seniority.
In their stand-off with the authority, public doctors have complained bitterly about long hours and heavy workloads, and used worries about doctor fatigue affecting patient safety to argue for reform. This is disingenuous. If this is the reason many of them quit the authority and go into private practice, do they not know that the goal of any private doctor is to have long hours and a heavy workload?