Hong Kong Hospital Authority to launch training programme to cut number of medical blunders
Authority chairman John Leong says regular forums will be held for junior doctors to highlight cases and offer ways to avoid mistakes
New initiatives to bring down the number of medical blunders in public hospitals are in the pipeline as the Hospital Authority identified some 30 types of mistakes most commonly made by medical professionals, the Post has been told.
Authority chairman Professor John Leong Chi-yan said in an exclusive interview that regular forums targeting these errors would soon be organised for junior doctors.
It would target the most common cases including surgical tools being left inside patients’ bodies, the wrong dose of medicine being prescribed and operations on the wrong side of a patient, he said.
“We have found that those medical blunders that took place in recent years have always involved similar problems,” Leong said. “There is nothing wrong with the medical teaching or the theories. The staff made the mistake when they were working.
“If we manage to avoid these types of errors again, the number of medical blunders will drop significantly.”
The forums will involve actual case scenarios to highlight common mistakes and offer tips to avoid them. Leong said doctors, especially junior ones, would be required to attend. They will be organised in different hospitals once every few months.
There would also be a new mentorship programme for nurses, in which senior and retired nurses would lead younger ones during their work, he said.
But despite the authority’s desire to cut down the number of medical blunders, Leong admitted it was an impossible task to eliminate them all, especially when the public health care sector bore the sole responsibility of training the city’s young doctors.
Some 30 per cent of doctors in public hospitals are graduates who have to go through internships or another six years of training to become specialists.
“Doctors in training have to be placed under supervision, but they cannot rely on their seniors forever.
At some point, they will have to start working on patients and it is difficult to avoid mistakes,” Leong said.
“We have also adopted a very transparent practice for disclosing all cases to the public,” he said.
There were 49 major blunders in public hospitals between October 2013 and September 2014. A total of 26 patients died.
The mishap rate is equivalent to 2.5 incidents per one million patient attendances – about 10 times lower than the 23 incidents per one million in Victoria in Australia, where a similar reporting system is in place.
Secretary for Food and Health Dr Ko Wing-man said it was important to educate the public that not all incidents were medical blunders as some health procedures had known complications.
He also said unfair accusations would damage the morale of medical staff. The government would soon discuss with them how to educate the public on the concept to avoid misunderstandings, Ko said.
Dr Pierre Chan, former president of the Public Doctors’ Association, said the measures were not perfect but at least were a first step for the Hospital Authority.
“By announcing these measures, the chairman showed that he is concerned about the blunders,” he said.
