Press Releases

SFH on misidentification of two babies incident and drug testing

Following is the transcript of remarks (English portion) made by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, at a stand-up media session after attending RTHK's "Pentaprism II" today (August 18):

Reporter: (blunder at QEH)

Secretary for Food and Health: As you know that health care is never 100%. I think Hong Kong has a mechanism of monitoring our professional standards. We also have peer review mechanism of the Medical Council, Nursing Council and so on. We also have an accountable and transparent policy regarding all medical incidents. So I think these are the mechanisms that are put in place. The most important aspect is once you see an experience of such an incident, you should learn from that incident and try to improve the existing mechanism, procedures and monitoring of those procedures. This is the responsibility of both the management as well as the professional leaders to ensure that we can upkeep our standard of practice. Nobody wants to see any medical incidents at all. But unfortunately, I think human error is always part of the whole process of health care. Usually you can see medical incidents of certain dimension everywhere. In Hong Kong, we are very transparent. We make sure that whenever we have such incidents, we will inform the public and the stakeholders. We explain to them. This would make our consumers and patients much smarter when they use our services. I think this is very important.

Reporter: Do you think the Hospital Authority should be held responsible for this baby incident?

Secretary for Food and Health: I think any incident that happens in an organisation or unit will be the responsibility of the organisation. As the Secretary for Food and Health, of course I also have the responsibility to ensure that these organisations are doing their duty in upkeeping their standards and be accountable for some of the mistakes.

Reporter: (on preventive measures)

Secretary for Food and Health: As I have said earlier, I think this is a very rare incident. And of course the hospital has a responsibility to ensure that this will not happen again. It is not the error of the procedures or the guidelines themselves, but rather it is the concentration and work attitude of some of the staff concerned. The Hospital Authority should learn from this particular mistake and be able to ensure that the other services and all the frontline workers would adopt a more correct attitude towards patient care.

Reporter: Is there a shortage of hands in the hospital system?

Secretary for Food and Health: In this case, there is no evidence that there is an excessive workload or any similar type of distraction because it happened at five o'clock in the morning. There were only three babies being delivered within the shift. So with the number of staff available, they should have ample resources to deal with such standard procedures.

Reporter: When were you informed of the incident?

Secretary for Food and Health: I was informed in the early morning of Monday.

Reporter: (feeling)

Secretary for Food and Health: I was upset because normally we are being informed a bit earlier.

Reporter: (on clinics and students' privacy for drug testing)

Secretary for Food and Health: These are not new clinics. They have been in place for some years. Over the years, we have not actually encountered any loss of identity or exposure of identity. It is important not just for those clinics but actually the Hospital Authority as a whole to safeguard the privacy of our patients. So far, apart from those cases that involved some of the staff downloading information to their USBs or their own personal computers resulting in the loss of information, there is no leakage of the information within the system itself. So I think it is important, just like any type of archiving and keeping of information, the electronic health record system so far is very throughput.

Reporter: (on drug testing)

Secretary for Food and Health: As I have explained earlier, the hair testing itself is a complicated process involving a sizeable amount of hair. It also needs washing the hair before it can be tested for the intrinsic constituents of drugs inside the hair. The result will not come back until a few days later. This is actually a tedious process. For testing of urine, you have a quick test. You can dip a test paper into the urine and get the result right away. It is important that in the screening, we use the most efficient method to try to ensure that we can have the results as early as possible so that we can single out those people that are at risk and be able to help them.

Reporter: (on cost of urine and hair tests)

Secretary for Food and Health: Not really. It is important to note that in screening, we want to have the result as soon as possible. This is the primary reason. We want to ensure that the youngsters being tested will be given the result within the same day or within an hour, rather than waiting for two days.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)





Ends/Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Issued at HKT 16:22

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