Category: Hospital
Budget promises local health care centre and hospital expansion
District health centres are to be established across Hong Kong and planning will shortly begin for the expansion of North Lantau Hospital, the government’s 2018-19 budget reveals.
Handing down the budget today, Financial Secretary Paul Chan says the first centre would be built in Kwai Chung in the third quarter of 2019, “after which we will progressively set up such centres in all 18 districts.”
He said he would set aside required resources to support the initiative, although he did not say where in Islands district the community centre would be located.
Chan said community-based healthcare could raise awareness of personal healthcare management and improve medical and rehabilitation services, thus reducing the load on hospitals.
North Lantau Hospital, which hit the headlines last year after an Audit Commission report assailed it for waste and mismanagement, is also set to expand. The commission found a fifth of the hospital was empty and some expensive medical equipment had been barely used.
Planning for the expansion will get underway in the 2020s to cope with the influx of more than 100,000 new residents within the next decade, Chan said.
Following release of the budget, Hospital Authority chairman Prof John Leung said the authority would commission more services for North Lantau hospital later this year.
Audit report attacks N. Lantau Hospital over waste
An auditor’s report has lambasted the North Lantau Hospital over its wasteful use of space and medical equipment.
Four years after being commissioned, a fifth of the hospital remains empty while tens of millions of dollars of equipment is under-used or has not been used at all, the report found.
In its October report to Legco, the Audit Commission revealed that of the hospital’s 13,729 sq m, 2,867 sq m remained empty or “had not been utilised for the intended functions,” including 2,204 sq m in space allocated for wards.
In one instance, the commission staff recorded an empty ward being used as a gym.
Hospital ward gym (Source: Audit Commission)
The report also found that of the ten major items of medical equipment, seven were being used at a rate below 60% of the forecast level.
These included a HK$7 million heart scanning unit being used at a 22% rate, and a prescription dispenser and an anaesthetics information system, each costing more than HK$3 million, being used at below 50%.
Many smaller items had never been used at all, including 42 electric beds and ten electric wheelchairs.
Unused beds and wheelchairs (Source: Audit Commission)
The report noted that some medical services had still not been commissioned, such as an out-patient gynaecology and paediatrics service that had been promised for 2014, and the provision of day-beds for day surgery patients, proposed for 2016.
It chastised Hospital Authority (HA) management for failing to keep the board informed about the status of these services and on when they were expected to be deployed.
The commission urged the HA to make more precise estimates of its requirements and to determine whether under-utilised spaces and equipment could be put to gainful use.
Lantau Confidential 