Outside In | Decades in the waiting, can Hong Kong finally get its primary healthcare right?
- The lack of deadlines is the least of the problems with the government’s plan for community-wide healthcare
- Our community should sit at the heart of the design of community clinics, not family physicians
It echoes the findings of Our Hong Kong Foundation researchers in their “Fit for Purpose” report released in December 2018. It recommended pivoting “away from the current emphasis on hospital-based, specialist, episodic and acute care towards care in the community that is continuous, person-centred, and caters for the holistic needs of individuals [that] will transform the delivery and experience of care, and improve health outcomes and efficiency”.
The comfort to be found in the Health Bureau’s report is that, having accepted the case for enhanced primary care, and learned some lessons from the horribly handled pandemic, the government now has a blueprint of what a reformed primary care sector would look like.
Its intentions are honourable: ensuring “accessible, comprehensive, continuing, coordinated and person-centred care”, prioritising illness prevention, providing one-stop care close to most homes, clear and reliable guidance on where to go if more specialist treatment is needed, reducing the need for constant hospital visits, and maintaining comprehensive and personalised healthcare records.