How can China’s Greater Bay Area improve health care to lure Hong Kong retirees and doctors?
Two Hong Kong medical experts lay out how firms from the city can muscle in on the mainland’s burgeoning private sector as Beijing implements its grand plan for the Pearl River Delta
Hong Kong doctors seeking a slice of the mainland China market and residents considering retirement across the border stand to gain if ideas from two of the city’s best-known medical professionals come to pass in the “Greater Bay Area”.
Former health minister Dr Ko Wing-man and Hong Kong’s richest ophthalmologist Dr Dennis Lam Shun-chiu have offered several recommendations to boost health care services in Beijing’s project to foster social and economic integration between Hong Kong, Macau and cities in the Pearl River Delta.
Both serve as advisers to the Chinese government – Ko directly on the bay area scheme and Lam as a national lawmaker.
Ko, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the nation’s top political advisory body, suggested mainland officials set up an independent professional body for the area to regulate medical practitioners, similar to the Medical Council of Hong Kong. No such body exists on the mainland, which has more than two million doctors.
Ko was a senior manager at several Hong Kong public hospitals during his career but resigned after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003.