Private Hong Kong doctors stay away from public subsidy scheme for hypertension patients

Private doctors are unhappy with a scheme that subsidises some public-hospital patients for treatment at private clinics in an effort to ease demand in the understaffed public sector.

The public-private partnership project, now running in Wong Tai Sin, Kwun Tong and Tuen Mun, provides hypertension patients with a subsidy of HK$2,708 for 10 treatments a year at a private clinic.

But only 80 of more than 400 private practitioners in these areas have joined the scheme since it began in April as many are in dispute with the Hospital Authority over the size of the subsidy.

The Medical Association, the main doctors' union, said the authority should not be the party that sets the market price.

"There is a conflict of interest when the authority is the one which distributes the public resources between themselves and the private doctors," association president Dr Louis Shih Tai-cho said. "The subsidy amount is too low to cover the consultation fee and cost of drugs."

The authority's chief manager for service transformation, Dr Choy Khai-meng, said they had attracted sufficient doctors to the scheme. But he defended the funding as fair and just.

The project is aimed at taking 30,000 hypertension patients out of public hospitals in the three districts to provide more capacity for patients needing urgent treatment. It costs the authority an average of HK$385 a visit to treat patients with the chronic condition at public hospitals.