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Sammy Heung

The number of non-locally trained doctors working at Hong Kong’s public hospitals will reach 300 by the end of the year, including about 70 under an exchange programme with mainland China and Macau, health authorities have said.
The Hospital Authority chairman Henry Fan Hung-ling said on Monday that officials had spoken with their mainland and Macau counterparts about recruiting more doctors for the second phase of a healthcare professionals exchange scheme.
He said there were currently 180 non-locally trained doctors at the city’s public hospitals.
“If everything goes smoothly, we expect, at the end of this year, the number of these doctors will increase from 180 to 300,” Fan noted.
The first batch of incoming healthcare professionals under the scheme comprised 10 doctors, 70 nurses and three traditional Chinese medicine experts from Guangdong province, who arrived in Hong Kong in April of last year and have already left.
Some 100 nurses from the mainland came to the city in March of this year under the second phase of the scheme.
Fan said the Hospital Authority in August had met with Guangdong province’s Health Commission, which had agreed to send more than 30 doctors to Hong Kong in the fourth quarter of this year.
He said health officials had also visited the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou , with its head agreeing to send more than 10 doctors to Hong Kong in batches within this year.
“What is heartening is that some of these doctors specialise in ophthalmology, anaesthesiology and radiology,” Fan said.
“These are specialities that have the most severe shortages in Hong Kong. They will have doctors who can help relieve our colleagues’ stress.”
Fan said authorities and hospitals in Shanghai and Beijing had also agreed to join the exchange scheme, with 13 doctors more to arrive in Hong Kong in the fourth quarter.
Macau was set to send another 18 doctors to the city, while the Global Healthcare Talent Scheme would help to bring in 30 from overseas, he said.
Fan said that Hong Kong would also send 18 doctors to Shanghai and Beijing for the exchange.
Official figures show the attrition rate for public hospital doctors over a 12-month period stood at 5.3 per cent as of the end of July, which is 0.1 per cent lower than the figure in April.
The data showed 346 full-time doctors had left and another 655 had joined up over that period. The authority employed 7,202 doctors on a full-time basis, according to the figures.

The attrition rate among public hospital nurses over a 12-month period stood at 8.2 per cent as of July, the same level as of April.
There were 2,203 full-time nurses who left the public healthcare service, while only 1,889 were recruited. The authority had 28,855 full-time nurses as of July.
Fan said the authority had received an “enthusiastic” response since Hong Kong lawmakers in July passed legislation allowing non-locally trained nurses with certain full-time experience to work in the city without first passing a licensing exam.
The authority had received about 200 job applications from candidates who met the job requirements and could speak Cantonese, with conditional offers being sent out, he added.
The authority chairman said health officials had organised promotion and recruitment drives in places such as Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, Zhuhai and Guangdong, as well as online meetings with nurses from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada.
Tony Ko Pat-sing, the organisation’s chief executive, said it had set a goal of recruiting 300 to 500 non-locally trained nurses in the first two years since the law had passed, adding that it could take three to six months, or even longer, for candidates to arrive.
Fan, meanwhile, said the authority had received a report from its review committee on public hospital management last Saturday, after the Health Bureau ordered an inquiry in response to multiple medical blunders and other incidents.
More than improvement 30 measures were suggested that concerned hospital governance, accountability, safety awareness, and communication with patients and coworkers, he added.
Fan said that while the authority would accept all measures raised in the report, the recommendations were “directional in nature” and needed to be refined.


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News

Hong Kong

Health & Environment

Hospital Authority meet with counterparts in Macau and mainland China to bring in more doctors under healthcare professionals exchange plan


Hospital Authority meet with counterparts in Macau and mainland China to bring in more doctors under healthcare professionals exchange plan.


Macau

Greater Bay Area

Hong Kong society