Pilot door-to-door hospital transfers from mainland China and Macau will not be two-way street at first, health secretary says
- Door-to-door service not reciprocal at first because of more complex procedures for approval of vehicles, doctors, equipment and medicine travelling from Hong Kong
- Secretary for Health Lo Chung-mau added service to be open to non-Hongkongers, but will not put a major burden on city health services
A pilot cross-border ambulance scheme will start with patients sent to Hong Kong from a mainland Chinese hospital and one in Macau, but would not be a two-way street, the city’s health chief has said.
Lo Chung-mau, the health secretary, told lawmakers on Friday that the door-to-door service would not be reciprocal at first because of the more complex procedures needed to preapprove the vehicles, doctors, medical equipment and medicines travelling from Hong Kong to the mainland or Macau.
He added the service would be open to non-Hongkongers, but was unlikely to put a major burden on the city’s public health system as just dozens of patients were likely to be eligible each year.
The pilot scheme, expected to start in the middle of the year after a trial run scheduled to begin as soon as the end of the month, would offer ambulance services to eligible patients from the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital on the mainland and Centro Hospitalar Conde de São Januário in Macau direct to Hong Kong’s public hospitals.
But no patients would be sent from Hong Kong to the two hospitals across the border in the first stage of the scheme.
Ambulances from the two hospitals that would be used to transfer patients to Hong Kong, as well as accompanying doctors, equipment and medication to be used on the vehicles, will require preapproval from Hong Kong authorities.
“We agree that this arrangement should be offered two-way,” Lo said. “But if we need to [send patients] northbound, the approval process would be much more complicated.
“On matters of approving technical issues, we can handle more quickly,” he added. “We don’t want to wait further … and so we try this single-way method first.”
Lo added the government would look into cross-border arrangements for patients travelling from Hong Kong, despite a relatively low demand, after the pilot north-to-south scheme started.
He was speaking after lawmakers questioned whether patients could also be sent to the mainland or Macau for treatment under the scheme.
“Treatments of combining Western and Chinese medicines on the mainland are done well,” Chan Wing-kwong said. “If some patients would like to seek medical care there, could they be transferred to the mainland too?”
Pilot cross-border hospital transfer scheme extended to non-Hongkonger patients
Lawmaker Tommy Cheung Yu-yan added that some mainland visitors to Hong Kong might also need to be transferred north.
Regulations to allow the grant of limited Hong Kong registration status to mainland and Macau doctors involved in cross-border transfers was gazetted on Friday.
Lo explained that the limited registration would only allow doctors to attend to the medical needs of patients under transfer in the ambulance.
He added patients transferred under the scheme would be sent to hospitals closest to the border once they arrived in Hong Kong.
Lo said if an ambulance from Macau entered the city using the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, it would go to North Lantau Hospital in Tung Chung.
If a mainland ambulance travelled through Shenzhen Bay, the patient could be sent to Tuen Mun Hospital or North District Hospital in Sheung Shui.
But patients that required treatment such as heart surgery would be sent to the hospitals with the specialist resources to handle the case.
The cross-border ambulance service was first suggested in the Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, published by Beijing in 2019.
A picture of health: medical struggles for Hongkongers in bay area
The bay area is Beijing’s plan to link Hong and Macau with nine southern mainland cities to create an economic powerhouse.
Some lawmakers were concerned whether Hong Kong’s public hospitals would face an extra workload if they took in non-Hongkonger patients from the bay area.
“Hong Kong’s public healthcare resources are very tight,” legislator Lam So-wai said.
“If we take in patients from the Greater Bay Area, would it add further strain to local public medical resources?”
But Lo said he expected the demand for public hospital services would not be greatly increased because of the direct ambulances, as he expected most users would be Hongkongers, who would be likely to return to the city in due course anyway.
Dr Michael Wong Lap-gate, the Hospital Authority’s director of quality and safety, said fewer than 10 patients each year travelled from Macau for treatment in Hong Kong’s public hospitals.
He added the Fire Services Department, the main provider of Hong Kong’s emergency ambulance service, got thousands of requests for pickups at the border with the mainland every year, but only a few hundred were considered to be serious cases.
