Hospital Authority will contract out haemodialysis to private sector
The Hospital Authority will contract out private haemodialysis services for 60 public patients to the private sector in the next three years.
The programme is the authority's latest public-private interface project, following the cataract-surgery programme and the primary-care project in Tin Shui Wai.
The Food and Health Bureau's consultant in public-private partnership, Choy Khai-meng, said it would be the first time the authority would purchase clinical services in the private sector.
Unlike the cataract and primary-care projects, where public patients become patients of private doctors, those who join the haemodialysis programme will remain public patients.
'We are very much concerned that the private clinical services must be reliable, safe and of good quality,' Dr Choy said.
The pilot programme will start by early next year. By March this year, about 820 patients were receiving haemodialysis at public hospitals and another 3,300 were on peritoneal dialysis. Demand for haemodialysis is on the rise because patients who can no longer use peritoneal dialysis need to switch to haemodialysis.
Dr Choy said haemodialysis was an expensive service and the cost for each patient was about HK$200,000 a year. Each patient needed two to three haemodialysis sessions a week.
There are eight private hospitals and three charitable organisations providing haemodialysis services in Hong Kong. The tender for the pilot scheme will be put out in the third quarter this year.
Dr Choy said the authority wanted to buy the private services for 60 renal patients in three years - 40 in the first year and 10 each in the second and third year.
Patients' Rights Association spokesman Tim Pang Hung-cheong agreed that contracting out haemodialysis could benefit patients who had been waiting for a long time for such services. He said the authority must carefully address two issues: affordability and the quality of the private services.
'Ideally, the public patients should not be asked to pay extra for having the services in the private sector,' he said. 'And if they have to pay more, the extra fee must be affordable to most of them. The authority also has to closely monitor the quality of the services.'
