Government must break Hong Kong doctors' protectionist barrier

How would you rate a public health system that asks its elderly citizens to wait up to three years for cataract treatment or two years for surgery on an enlarged prostate?

Judging by treatment quality, Hong Kong's health care system is world-class. Judging by the accessibility of services at our public hospitals, Hong Kong is almost third-world. Why this discrepancy? Blame it on the all-powerful medical lobby that keeps foreign-trained doctors from coming to Hong Kong to serve our patients.

Hong Kong has only 1.7 doctors per 1,000 people, against an average of three per 1,000 in developed countries. The government pours enormous resources into health care, but its hands are tied by the Medical Council and local doctors' union that resolutely keep out much-needed doctors from abroad. Our public hospitals are chronically short-staffed, severely affecting the quality of patient care. But the problem isn't a budgetary shortfall; it is allowing the medical profession to dictate things on its own terms.

Medical doctors are expensive to train. Its costs our taxpayers about HK$3.5 million to train a physician with basic qualifications at our two university medical schools. Limited teaching resources keep the total intake of medical students at around 250 to 320 a year, although plans are afoot to increase it to 400 over the next few years.

But the acute shortage can be corrected with a simple solution: importing qualified doctors. Some countries are doing it with great success.

Take Singapore. Like Hong Kong, Singapore is short of doctors. But, unlike Hong Kong, Singapore's Medical Council, which decides who can and cannot practise medicine, does not require foreign medical graduates to pass any licensing exams to work in a hospital. Instead, it allows international medical graduates to practise in its approved health care institutions, provided they come from a list of recognised medical schools.