Legco votes for an ombudsman to deal with medical blunders
The main political parties yesterday backed a proposal to set up an ombudsman's office to handle complaints about medical blunders.
The office would be independent and have statutory powers to investigate and conciliate complaints.
The vote follows a series of medical blunders which have triggered an outcry over the quality of the city's health care system and the accountability of its hospital officials.
But Secretary for Food and Health York Chow Yat-ngok said having an ombudsman would make the system more bureaucratic and cause confusion about the roles of the bodies now handling complaints.
Democrat Andrew Cheng Kar-foo, who proposed the motion, said the lack of a uniform mechanism made filing complaints against hospitals costly and time-consuming.
'The complainants have been put in an unfair position, as they lack legal and financial support to challenge bureaucracies,' Mr Cheng said.
He said the proposed ombudsman's office should be given power to investigate and conciliate complaints, as well as handle compensation matters.
Gary Chan Hak-kan, of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, who proposed revisions to the motion, said the proposal aimed to ensure that complaints would be handled impartially and transparently, and within a reasonable time frame.
Most lawmakers advocated a better mechanism for handling complaints, but some also raised concerns about the motion.
Medical sector legislator Leung Ka-lau cast doubt on the need for a new layer of bureaucracy. He said 90 per cent of the 2,700 or so complaints public hospitals received each year were settled.
Civic Party lawmaker Ronny Tong Ka-wah also doubted the cost-effectiveness of establishing a new ombudsman's office to handle complaints. He suggested the government give more resources to the existing Office of the Ombudsman to allow it to handle cases concerning medical blunders.
Mr Tong also said an ombudsman should not be given power to rule on compensation, because that might be unfair to defendants.
Dr Chow said in a concluding statement the existing systems for handling health care complaints - an independent panel under the Hospital Authority, medical professional groups and the judiciary - had a clear division of work. Creating an ombudsman could muddy that clear division, undermine the autonomy of the medical professional groups and extend the time it took to handle complaints.
Dr Chow said the Hospital Authority would introduce a pilot accreditation scheme to assess public hospitals' service quality and raise the public's confidence in them.
Recent hospital blunders have included the loss of the body of a baby boy at Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Chai Wan last month and the failure to save a heart attack patient who collapsed outside the lobby of the Caritas Medical Centre in Sham Shui Po, also last month.
