Wealth Blog | Public hospitals - Britain versus Hong Kong

Having now experienced both Hong Kong's Health Authority and Britain's National Health Service hospitals, version 2014, it's interesting to make comparisons. Admittedly it's my father who is currently in the clutches of the NHS, but having now sat for a week beside him in first a high dependency and now a surgical ward, I've gained some good insights.

First off, the Musgrove Park NHS Hospital in Taunton, Somerset dates back to the Second World War when it was built by the US forces. The corridor from the front entrance to the men's surgical unit involves pushing my mother's wheelchair half a mile. I know this, because the porter told me the distance, but we usually make our own way because he takes 20 minutes to appear. The hospital was designed for US Army jeeps to zip up and down the endless internal corridors, bizarre though that might sound.

Hong Kong’s Queen Mary and Princess Margaret Hospitals are far more compact. My memory of the PM involves being unceremoniously tipped from the ambulance stretcher onto a trolley, by staff wearing pink Wellington boots. Wellies don’t feature in the NHS. The alarming tendency of PM nurses to shunt patients around on mobile beds four at a time, by banging them together like supermarket trolleys, is also mercifully absent from the NHS. Also, when you ask an NHS nurse for a drink or to go to the loo, she does not respond: "too busy - ask family member" - the stock PM response. Neither does the NHS allow mob-handed family visits, or banquet-scale picnics in the ward with relatives perched on the end of other patients' beds. That and terrifying unmasked coughing are my abiding memories of the Queen Mary respiratory ward.

But my experience of Hong Kong public hospitals is that they are efficient, effective and get the job done, even if bedside manner is a low priority. The NHS cannot claim all the rosettes. 
 

Zero communication

NHS doctors are revered and genuflected too. Everyone seems to forget they are not demi-gods, just mere mortals who studied hard.

The well-publicised NHS trait of withholding patient information is alive and well. Nurses seem to be so petrified of being held accountable that they will not even tell you if it's raining. Many even avoid eye contact, scuttling about like startled rabbits, heads down. Getting updates on Dad’s medical prognosis involves ambushing the consultant as he makes his early morning rounds. I feel slightly daft stalking a doctor in a hospital ward, but if you want to find anything out, it’s the only way. And it’s not easy. First it involves sweet talking a staff nurse to let you in, because it's outside the strict visiting hours. Then you must penetrate the cordon of fawning baby doctors and nurses who flank Mr Consultant, hanging on his every word. One junior houseman winked at me and said you wouldn't think we're short of doctors in the NHS, would you? He was one of six tailing my target vascular specialist.