One in 10 patients who undergo emergency operations in public hospitals die within 30 days, and nearly 40 per cent suffer complications.
The Hospital Authority said these outcomes were 'good' compared with health systems overseas, and showed Hong Kong's public hospitals had a good quality of care. But what may concern the public and authorities are the performance variations among the 17 public hospitals with surgical departments, disclosed in the authority's first comprehensive audit of public surgical services.
Several public hospitals with relatively poor results have been asked to improve their standards and learn from the good performers.
In some cases, small hospitals outperform major hospitals. Doctors say manpower, resources, skills and hospitals' culture in clinical governance all contribute to the variations.
The audit - called the surgical outcomes monitoring and improvement programme (SOMIP) - compares the performance of 17 surgical departments by checking the outcome of 21,839 major operations between July 2008 and June 2009. Of these, 22 per cent were emergency operations, the rest were elective.
The audit findings have been regarded as sensitive information 'for internal use only', and have never been made known to the public.