CY Leung blames nursing home abuse on Hong Kong's shortage of land

Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying yesterday said the city's shortage of land on which to build was a key culprit in the poor treatment of residents at its homes for the elderly.

Leung made the comments two days after the Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao reported that residents of the Cambridge Nursing Home in Tai Po were left naked or half-dressed on an open-air podium for up to 90 minutes before staff took them to shower.

"If we had more land, we could provide space to non-profit organisations to offer more elderly home services … the elderly and their children could afford a better service," he told a Legislative Council question-and-answer session yesterday.

While Labour Party lawmaker Dr Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung criticised Leung for failing to introduce an accreditation system to monitor private homes, Leung said the root of the issue was the shortage of land.

"Even with an accreditation system, if the issue over land is not resolved, if home prices and rent remain expensive, elderly people still will not get good services at private facilities," the chief executive said.

He was responding to Cheung's question about the incident at the Cambridge facility, in which residents in wheelchairs were stripped by staff members outdoors before they were taken into an indoor shower area, footage of which Ming Pao recorded last month.

Leung said he was "saddened" by the incident, and had visited some homes for the elderly in the past and found the quality of their services varied.