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Phila Siu

 
Doctors have urged Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to cut red tape and give individual public hospitals the power to decide how resources are best allocated.
The demands were made in a meeting between Lam and 17 representatives from the Public Doctors’ Association and Frontline Doctors’ Union on Tuesday night.
The doctors complained of long working hours and an insurmountable workload.
“The winter flu seasons that have come year after year have overloaded public hospitals. Doctors and nurses have been suffering from low morale,” the association said in a statement after the 1½-hour meeting at Ruttonjee Hospital in Wan Chai.
“The difficult situation we are facing now is a result of the lack of long-term planning more than a decade ago.”

The association complained that the government had cut 2,600 beds from public hospitals after the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak hit Hong Kong in 2003, killing 299 people.
The government was not spending enough on health care, it said.
Frontline hospital staff have become the scapegoats of the government’s blunders
Public Doctors’ Association
“The Hospital Authority can only barely maintain [its services]. Frontline hospital staff have become the scapegoats of the government’s blunders,” it said.
The association demanded that the management structure of the authority, which runs the city’s 43 public hospitals, be simplified. Red tape must also be cut, it said, and individual hospitals should be given the power to decide how to allocate resources.
Frontline employees should be given places on the board of the authority, which also needed to hold regular meetings with staff, the association added.
It also called for working hours to be capped.

The meeting took place after Professor John Leong Chi-yan, chairman of the authority, praised the professionalism of staff during the winter flu season.
The death rate among the more than 11,000 flu patients seen since the beginning of peak season in January was 2.1 per cent, compared with about 2.6 per cent in the past two years, Leong said.
Hong Kong’s ex-health chief slams voucher scheme for the elderly
As of March 7,499 adult flu patients had required intensive care, of whom 278 died. Some 29 children were left in a serious condition by the virus, including a two-year-old who died, according to the Centre for Health Protection.
Last year, there were 497 serious adult cases, 326 of them fatal, and two children died.
 


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Overworked public doctors call for hospital red tape to be cut after meeting Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam

Carrie Lam met representatives from doctors’ groups on Tuesday evening. Photo: RTHK

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News

Hong Kong

Health & Environment

Demands were made in a meeting between Lam and 17 representatives from the Public Doctors’ Association and Frontline Doctors’ Union
Doctors complained of long hours and an insurmountable workload


Demands made in a meeting between Lam and 17 representatives from the Public Doctors’ Association and Frontline Doctors’ Union on Tuesday night.
