Transcript of remarks of SFH at media session
*********************************************
Reporter: Professor Chan, it is obvious that the extra $500 million funding cannot solve the core problems of the Hospital Authority, especially staff shortage.
Secretary for Food and Health: The additional funding provided to the Hospital Authority (HA) yesterday is really for short term measures in terms of increasing nursing manpower in the HA, especially during this winter surge period. Those are mainly for increasing part-time nurses, or providing special honorarium to nurses, or expanding such programmes, or increasing flexibility so that more nurses can be hired to deal with the current manpower shortage situation, especially during the winter surge. Some of the funding will be used for hiring, perhaps, more clerical staff so that nurses can allot more time to their clinical work in taking care of patients. The HA is looking into details as to how they are going to spend this additional funding and they will give us a report shortly. Of course, this is only for short term measures. For the medium to long term, I think it is more important to have better planning, so I have already requested the HA to provide the Food and Health Bureau (FHB) with a report to outline what the current shortfall in nurses are, whether the baseline currently is enough to cope with the expanding or increasing services and the number of patients going to the HA. After receiving the report, we will revisit the entire situation of nursing manpower, and perhaps the manpower situation of other healthcare professionals. If you remember, the FHB has earlier published the report on manpower on doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals that showed a shortage of these manpower. The HA is going to look into these issues and we will provide appropriate resources for these manpower.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Issued at HKT 17:13
Issued at HKT 17:13
NNNN