Letters | Easing the pressure on Hong Kong’s health sector starts with effective public-private partnership
- Private doctors should be allowed to run clinics for profit for specific services, but must provide affordable care to patients with chronic conditions
However, public clinics, with their limited scale, are not able to provide care to all these patients, thus increasing their risk of hospitalisation. In other words, without a comprehensive health care financing programme for citizens, the private sector is not adequate to provide primary care to those most at risk.
This problem has proven extremely difficult to address. Since the early days after the handover, there have been ongoing debates on health care financing but no consensus has been reached. The out-of-pocket payment remains high.
Another way to resolve the problem is an ambitious expansion of public primary care services, but this would increase the regular expenses of the government substantially and so is not very feasible either.
My suggestion would be to allow private physicians to run the clinic for profit for specific types of services (such as paediatrics, gynaecology, etc) but also require them to provide care to patients with chronic illnesses at an affordable preset level of fees. That way, the partnership is both profitable and effective in providing quality primary care.
Francisco T.T. Lai, PhD candidate in public health, the Chinese University of Hong Kong