The system for disciplining public hospital staff is being reviewed to make it more 'just', the Hospital Authority chief executive said.
The authority was reviewing the system because the existing grounds for punishing staff were too broad and unclear, Shane Solomon said.
The authority's punishments of hospital staff over medical incidents have been controversial. While patients' rights activists complain that some disciplinary actions are too lenient, some frontline doctors are frustrated that the authority has failed to hold senior management responsible.
The chief of the emergency room at the Caritas Medical Centre, Ng Fu, has launched a judicial review against the authority's disciplining of him after the death of a man outside the hospital in December. Dr Ng said the authority had not given him a fair chance to defend himself.
The authority's previous proposal to sack staff who lose patients' data drew strong opposition from frontline staff, who described the policy as too harsh. The proposal failed to gain approval from the board.
Mr Solomon said the review aimed to create a 'just culture', so staff would be open about mistakes. He said failure to report a mistake was more serious than making one.
Under the new system, there were 'layers of responses' to different kinds of incidents, such as the loss of patient data.