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The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
Over 3,000 experts and professionals from the local, Mainland and international healthcare sector have gathered at the two-day annual Hospital Authority (HA) Convention 2010 being held today and tomorrow (May 10 and 11) to share innovative ideas for the improvement of the health of the community and also to help shape the direction of healthcare development in the years to come.
The main theme of this year's HA Convention is "Happy Staff Healthy People", which is underpinned by the following sub-themes:
กค Organisational performance
กค Patient safety and quality
กค Caring workforce and staff competence
กค Strategic health service planning
The HA Convention 2010 was officially opened this morning by the Chief Executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Mr Donald Tsang; the Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Vice Minister of Health, Dr Zhang Mao; the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow; the HA Chairman, Mr Anthony Wu; and the HA Chief Executive, Mr Shane Solomon.
In his welcoming address, Mr Anthony Wu began with a review of the challenges in the past two years since the last HA Convention in 2008. "Shortly after the 2008 Convention, it was the Sichuan earthquake and we quickly dispatched a team of over 60 people to Chengdu to help with the rescue operation and to provide rehabilitation services thereafter.
"It was followed by the medical coverage for the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic equestrian events and the handling of the melamine-tainted milk product crisis in which necessary structure and protocols within days provided screening, assessment and medical services to 57,000 children.
"Just when we had our sigh of relief on melamine and were getting ready for the 2009 HA Convention, we had our very first confirmed case of human swine flu (H1N1) on May 1, 2009, in Hong Kong," Mr Wu said, recalling the last-minute cancellation of the convention last year due to the pandemic.
Continuing his review, Mr Wu noted Hong Kong's hosting of the East Asian Games in December 2009 with the HA making an all-out effort to provide medical support for the Games. "Our staff brought their professionalism into full play and made HA part of the legend," he said.
On the convention's theme of "Happy Staff Healthy People", he said, "Staff are our most important asset and we have been rolling out various initiatives to implement our People First policy."
Mr Wu concluded his address by extending a note of thanks to the Government for a three-year funding arrangement for 2009 to 2012. "That allows us to expand and enhance our services with the increased expenditure on healthcare to 17% of recurrent Government expenditure by 2012."
Delivering his keynote speech "From P4P to VMV", the Authority's Chief Executive, Mr Shane Solomon expressed his views on HA's Vision, Mission and Values (VMV).
He said that the HA's challenge is to bring the VMV to life with five strategic priorities: patient empowerment initiatives, managing demand to reduce waiting time, safety and quality programmes, reasonable workload, and a campaign to redesign the care process.
Mr Solomon remarked that as part of the Government's reform of primary care, new patient empowerment programmes will be offered focusing first on diabetes and hypertension. Nurses and allied health clinics will continue to help people to manage their chronic illnesses. In 2009-10, the programme had over 47,000 attendances.
He moved on to the progress in updating the Clinical Management System (CMS) and developing the Electronic Health Record (eHR) for all of Hong Kong. "By the end of 2013/14, the eHR sharing platform will be ready for connection with all public and private hospitals. By 2018/19, Hong Kong residents will have their own personal health records, covering both the HA and private sectors.
"This is one of the world's first. Patients need information to manage their own health and to make choices about treatment - the Electronic Health Record will help empower people," he said.
On reducing waiting times, Mr Solomon said that a multi-pronged effort would be needed. "First, the extra funding from the Government will increase the number of patients treated, and our Pay for Performance (P4P) system provides the incentive to treat more patients through targeting areas of long waits."
He added that the HA is working on new service performance pledges, and in consultation with clinician colleagues, "we are working on new key performance indicators for waiting time such as joint replacement and cataract."
On safety and quality programmes, he cited several examples of quality improvement. "Our innovative 2D bar coding system has been created to ensure correct patient identification in specimen collection. After eight months of the implementation in seven hospitals, the misidentification error has been reduced by 77% per month.
"In the past two years the number of medication incidents reported through our Advanced Incident Reporting System has dropped by 13%."
Alongside forthcoming quality improvement initiatives such as the Inpatient Medication Order Entry system, filmless radiology and the Crew Resources Management System, he highlighted two important HA system-wide programmes: the Hospital Accreditation Programme which will cover all major hospitals over the next few years and the HA-wide Patient Satisfaction Survey which will be piloted this year.
Mr Solomon also talked about managing workloads to achieve "Happy Staff". "For doctors, we have started to address this through the Doctor Work Reform programme which has reduced the proportion of doctors working over 65 hours per week from 18% to 5%. We still have more work to do to reduce continuous working hours."
He said the next challenge is the workload of nurses. "The next step forward is introducing nurse-to-patient ratios that are reasonable and really put them into practice. We have done the technical work and gained a consensus on what the workload should be. What we really need now is more nurses."
With a promising outlook in the supply of nurses over the next few years, he said he was confident that the nurse workload would be brought down to a more reasonable level.
"I am impressed with some methods that are being adapted from the manufacturing industry into healthcare, such as 'lean thinking' and the 'six sigma' technique. They look at the work process, and assess whether it can be simplified and whether each part adds some value to the patient."
Mr Solomon concluded that the five priority projects will carry forward the new VMV and make the HA a truly P2P (people-to-people) organisation.
Ends/Monday, May 10, 2010
Issued at HKT 15:40
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