END OF 2013 MESSAGE TO UH DOCTORS & MANAGERS

From desks of Drs Anthony Lee and Ares Leung

December 2013

As New Year is approaching, we would take this as an opportunity to extend heartfelt greetings for the season and our appreciation to all of your accomplishments and achievements in the last twelve months.

Summarising 2013

Though we do not receive any more mainland mothers to give birth in Hong Kong, our labour ward is doing well and we are delivering 3,700 to 3,800 births in 2013. This was an impossible success. Our heartiest thanks to our obstetricians and labour ward colleagues.

From the beginning of the year, we worked on improvement of efficiency of the hospital. There was a several percent reduction of headcounts. We do appreciate the hard work of our colleagues. We shall examine work-flow along this direction in future.

We have just gone through ISO CAV, and annual surprise visit for licencing from the Department of Health. Following these visits, we received reassuring comments on our performance. Every colleague in each of the departments deserves to be proud.

In response to the Government’s initiative in promoting price transparency in Private Hospitals, Financial Consent (Estimation) Form was first launched in Union Hospital in May this year. We thank doctors and our supporting staffs for their cooperation and we hope this transparency in fees would become the showcase of UH.

After serving as the Management Board Chairman for 18 years and contributing extensively to Union Hospital, Prof Nat Yuen has resigned from his position but he will continue as a member in the Board. Prof Yuen wishes to spend more time with his family, and his decision was also triggered by arrival of a new member, his grandchild. The Management Board has approached Prof Fok Tai Fai, the Pro-Vice Chancellor of CUHK, who will take up the important position as the new Chairman of the Board of the Hospital. We each communicated with Prof Fok, and pledged him full support.

In the middle of the year, the Hospital Management Board endorsed the core values of the institute as Caring, Reliable and Empathetic. It is a most appropriate position that a healthcare organisation prides itself to occupy as being reliable to its clients. When healthcare workers are empathetic, there will be minimal internal conflict, and the institute will receive support from their clients. Empathetic responses also greatly reduce chance of unhappy client interaction. Therefore, these two pillars are exactly the virtues of a decent healthcare institute. In future, the C.A.R.E of UH might be Careful, (pro-)Active, Reliable and Empathetic. These virtues together are going to form the character of our organisation and the spirit of our staff.

The Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital has adopted the approach to elect 12 clinical departments in 2013. More than a decade ago, we established the Department of O&G in 2002. We proceeded by need and maturity, instead of formality. We have already many departments formed.  We are happy that our approach has been similarly adopted by the private hospital that has the longest history in Hong Kong.

In 2013, we spotted that some specialist doctors were getting apprehensive about the way that specialist registration is handled by the Hong Kong Medical Council on the matter of convicted medical misconduct. We, hospital administrators and the supporting colleagues shall work along with the doctors to minimize the risks in leading to adverse outcomes from medical misconduct.

We are alerted of potential misunderstandings from some solo visiting colleagues on the process of removal of admission rights in private hospitals. We are encouraged to establish standardized processes to tackle these unlucky dismissal events. Colleagues can be well assured that, in UH, fairness is given the highest priority and well defined processes are followed. In fact, all previous removal of admission rights in Union Hospital had been discussed in the Medical Advisory Committee even before anyone was aware of possible disgruntles. In future, there will be balance among chances for individual doctors to explain, governance of hospital, and confidentiality.

Looking forward, in 2014 and the future

There will be minor work on renovation in our operation theatres, and we are spending resources to acquire suitable instruments for good service to our doctors and optimal patient care. We are on the process of acquiring endo-luminal ultrasound, and an additional set of 3D laparoscopic system.

The Hospital is planning on a decanting block to accommodate outpatient services and some support services. This will release some space for building addition inpatient beds and thus to release wards for renovation. In the near future of several years, we will be having approximately 50 to 100 new additional beds for inpatient facilities. This plan is by far the most promising and highly probable to be practical. While we know that the number of beds is the bottle-neck in UH, we have to be careful in expansion plans in view of rapid increase in private hospital beds in Hong Kong.

We are aware that CUHK is going to build a new private hospital within the next five years. The number of private hospital beds will increase from present 4,000 to probably nearly 6,000 in several years’ time. The habitat in private medicine in Hong Kong will change tremendously. We are sure that, with your support, UH is going to gain strength and reputation, allowing us go through rough water at the time of keen competition. We have the following few years, as a window period, to perfect our team as much as possible for the future. We hope that the CUHK private hospital is going to be our partner in practice instead of next-door competitor. Our team will do everything possible to work a friendly relationship, and we hope the CUHK counter- parts will act similarly.

In the past 2 years, we have witnessed sudden changes in the way the lay media and lay opinion leaders treat private medicine. In some occasions, it amounted to mob verdicts even before evidence was gathered. Of course, the impact was negative to healthcare providers. The change was rapid, but we also learned very fast. The hospital is confident that we have grasped suitable defense positions even in the middle of these rapid changes. Colleagues can be well assured that we shall not yield to threats as long as we provide appropriate care to clients. We acquired experience in handling regulators of performance and the lay media. We have also developed skills to resolve conflict between dissatisfied clients and healthcare providers. We continue to support doctors and professionals in regular and even in impossible times.