Press Releases

SFH on medical manpower

Following is the transcript of remarks (English portion) made by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, at a media session after attending a public function today (March 4):

Reporter: (on medical manpower)

Secretary for Food and Health: The management of the Hospital Authority has met with the frontline representatives and also the doctors' unions. There are two unions involved. They have also agreed that they would investigate and work together on a model to resolve some of the issues that they have mentioned. As I said earlier, we need to look at the promotion aspects of certain specialties, particularly the internal medicine specialty, because the wastage of that specialty was actually not very high before. And we do not like to have wastage of people simply because they cannot be promoted, and yet, they are actually delivering very good and very well deserved service. This is another area that we would like to address. The solution has to lie with discussion between both the management as well as the clinical departments, and also the input of the Hong Kong College of Physicians, which governs the training and the standard of internal medicine in Hong Kong.

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



Ends/Friday, March 4, 2011
Issued at HKT 14:44

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