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LCQ12: Hospital accreditation programme
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     Following is a question by the Professor Hon Joseph Lee and a written reply by the Secretary for Food and Health, Professor Sophia Chan, in the Legislative Council today (November 21):
 
     From April 2009 to January this year, the Hospital Authority (HA) had implemented a hospital accreditation programme (the accreditation programme) by phases in public hospitals, with a view to enhancing the accountability of hospitals for service quality and safety. In this connection, will the Government inform this Council whether it knows:
 
(1) the (i) expenditure incurred and (ii) manpower resources deployed (including the respective numbers of staff members and working hours involved, broken down by staff grade) in each of the past five years by public hospitals for implementing the accreditation programme, with a tabulated breakdown by name of hospital and the cluster to which the hospital belonged; and
 
(2) the service quality improvement initiatives identified, by HA in each of the past five years, during the implementation of the accreditation programme, and whether HA allocated, in respect of such initiatives, additional financial and manpower resources to the various public hospitals; if HA did, of the details with a tabulated breakdown by name of hospital and the cluster to which the hospital belonged; if not, the reasons for that?
 
Reply:
 
President,
 
     My reply to the various parts of the question raised by the Professor Hon Joseph Lee is as follows:
 
(1) The Hospital Authority (HA) has implemented in phases a hospital accreditation programme in public hospitals of all clusters since 2009, with a view to enhancing the quality of hospital services and patients' safety. Hospital accreditation is one of the HA's continuous quality improvement programmes. The recurrent funding for implementing the hospital accreditation programme and related continuous quality improvement programmes in the clusters is currently about $60 million per year. The funding is mainly used for commissioning an internationally recognised accrediting organisation to conduct a series of independent and objective assessments of hospital performance, developing territory-wide accreditation standards, providing staff training, providing support for hospital clusters in their accreditation and improvement work, and funding daily expenses, etc. The hospital accreditation programme covers areas such as clinical services, logistics support and institutional management, and is a cross-cluster and inter-departmental continuous quality improvement programme that engages staff of various grades. Staff involved in the hospital accreditation programme are also engaged in other healthcare services. Hence, the HA does not have a breakdown of the relevant grades, number of staff and working hours involved in the programme.
 
(2) Hospital accreditation is one of the HA's continuous quality improvement programmes. The HA has put in place an established mechanism, under which hospital clusters are allocated additional funding each year through the annual planning exercise for increasing manpower and improving services according to the needs of individual clusters, which are determined by factors such as the population growth of the catchment districts, and manpower and service arrangements of hospitals. The HA does not have a breakdown of additional resources and manpower deployed for implementing the hospital accreditation programme.
 
Ends/Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Issued at HKT 14:30
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