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Following is a question by the Hon James Tien and a reply by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, in the Legislative Council today (May 7):
Question:
There have been comments that the services provided by Tseung Kwan O Hospital (TKOH) have long been inadequate to meet the demands of members of the public and the wards in the hospital are often full. TKOH is planning to apply for funding for an expansion project. However, it has been reported recently that a number of the wards in TKOH have actually been left vacant for a long period of time, with some of them not being in use for as long as nine years. Some of such wards have even been used for storing sundries only. In this connection, will the Government inform this Council if it knows:
(a) the details concerning the wards in TKOH which have been left vacant for a long period of time, and the reasons why they have been left vacant;
(b) whether TKOH has drawn up measures to ensure the efficient utilisation of resources, so as to avoid the situation that while some of its services have long been inadequate to meet the demands of members of the public, some of its wards are persistently under-utilised; and
(c) whether currently there are similar cases in other public hospitals in which wards and hospital beds have been left vacant for a long period of time; if there are such cases, of the numbers of such wards and beds and their respective vacant periods, and the improvement measures the authorities have put in place?
Reply:
Madam President,
(a) In the past, it usually takes 10 years or longer before a hospital could be commissioned after the planning and construction stage. Wards and beds of hospital will be opened for use in phases according to service needs. The hospital will also from time to time adjust the number and use of wards and beds according to actual situation.
The Tseung Kwan O Hospital (TKOH) was planned to provide a total of 458 in-patient beds. Among which 377 have already been opened in phases to meet service demand since the end of 1999, providing in-patient services for various specialties such as medicine, surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics and orthopaedics and traumatology. In the past three years, the average bed occupancy rate of TKOH was 83% which was comparable to that of other public acute hospitals.
The remaining 81 beds of TKOH which have not yet been made available for in-patient services are mainly from the obstetrics ward, special care baby unit, pediatrics ward and special class ward. For obstetric services, statistics for the past five years show that the number of newborns in Tseung Kwan O and Sai Kung districts remained stable at about 2,500 on average in each of the five years, with about 1,700 and 800 of them born in public and private hospitals respectively. Currently, the obstetric services provided by the United Christian Hospital are able to cater for the demand for such services in the whole Kowloon East (KE) Cluster.
Against the above background, in order to utilise resources efficiently, TKOH has made use of the wards original intended for obstetrics and paediatrics services to provide a range of clinical support services, including medical in-patient services, paediatric milk formulation, nasopharyngeal tests, training for nurses as well as temporary beds when necessary (e.g. during renovation or decanting of hospital wards). In addition, one of TKOH's wards has been converted to serve as an infection control ward with negative pressure for emergency use in the event of a major outbreak of influenza and idiopathic infectious diseases. As for the special class ward and the special care baby unit of TKOH, they have been temporarily used for administrative office and storage respectively given the change in service demand and that obstetric services are not yet warranted for the time being.
(b) At present, the Hospital Authority (HA) monitors and reviews the utilisation of clinical services regularly through various internal review mechanisms, such as the quarterly meetings with hospital clusters and the progress reports on annual plan submitted by hospital clusters to HA Head Office. Through these arrangements, the clusters can develop their service rationalisation programmes and plan for changes in the number of beds in the light of changing service demand, so as to ensure optimum utilisation of resources and improve service to meet public needs. HA will closely monitor the utilisation of obstetric services in the KE Cluster through the above arrangements, so as to assess the need to launch obstetric services in TKOH.
(c) At present, some of the infirmary beds in the Chesire Home, Shatin (SCH) and in the Tai Po Hospital (TPH) are vacant. There are 50 vacant beds in SCH and HA plans to reopen these beds by phases in 2008-09 and 2009-10. On the other hand, there are 34 vacant beds in TPH. TPH plans to renovate the ward this year for the provision of rehabilitation services to tie in with the development of orthopaedics and medical in-patient services at TPH these two years.
Ends/Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Issued at HKT 14:42
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