Hong Kong’s novice lawmakers: surgeon hopes to cut waiting times, move health care services closer to residents
- David Lam says city’s rapidly ageing society needs a coordinated community health care network
- Democratic reforms can wait, while health care, housing are priorities, says medical sector lawmaker
Dr David Lam Tzit-yuen imagines a day when Hong Kong’s community health care will be so well coordinated that people no longer have to travel to public hospitals and endure long waiting times to be treated.
A strong connection between public hospitals and neighbourhood medical professionals will be key to making that dream a reality.
“The community will then become a ‘hospital without walls’,” he said. “We have been relatively slow in pushing this forward, but the population is ageing fast and will not wait.”
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Hong Kong’s new medical sector lawmaker told the Post that primary health care, the provision of essential medical services in the community, would be his priority over the next four years.
The 56-year-old surgeon and former vice-president of the Hong Kong Medical Association said he was concerned that Hongkongers, especially the elderly and poor, had to rely on public hospitals for medical follow-ups and essential health care services that ought to be available nearer their homes.
That was because the city lacked a coordinated community health care network which ensured doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, dentists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners were easily accessible and collaborated to help residents in neighbourhoods and public housing estates.
Agreeing, lawmaker Lam said: “Residents, especially those discharged from hospital, should have a family doctor who acts as a health care manager helping to connect patients with pharmacists and physiotherapists in the community.
“Or there could be community health care centres where nurses help residents to seek help from pharmacists and doctors.”
Lam said he hoped his plan to expand community medical services would open job opportunities for more than 100,000 health care professionals, whose careers would not be limited to public and private hospitals, which were now either too crowded or niche.
“Medical professionals all want to help people, but there is now a lot of frustration at the workplace and in society,” he said.
“The elderly wait for a year or two [for their appointments] but doctors only have time to see them for five minutes. How can we provide the elderly better services? We need to give medical professionals a direction that we can all work towards.”
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Asked to comment on the government’s handling of the pandemic and what more could be done to contain the virus, Lam said boosting vaccination rates would be more effective than adopting universal testing, which some of his pro-establishment colleagues had suggested.
To alleviate the burden on nurses in public hospitals, health authorities should create more part-time job opportunities for them, he said. Full-time nurses would then have the option to switch to part-time work, while those who quit their jobs because of the workload could also return to help on an intermittent basis, he added.
Married with a daughter, Lam graduated from Chinese University’s medical school in 1991 and was a surgeon at Prince of Wales and United Christian hospitals before moving to private practice in 2003.
He spent 12 years as a member of the Medical Council, which handles registration and disciplinary matters concerning doctors, and was a vice-president of the Medical Association, which represents more than 12,000 medical practitioners, from 2018 to 2020.
The bill was shelved in 2003 after an estimated half a million people took to the streets to oppose it.
Lam said the Article 23 requirement was “not something special”, adding: “All advanced countries around the world have such laws. The issue is that when it is being drafted, it’s written in a way that’s good and acceptable to all.”
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Previously, medical and health services were separate functional constituencies in the legislature and were represented by opposition lawmakers or non-establishment independents. In 2016, the voter turnout for the medical sector was 74 per cent and for health services 69 per cent.
Lam won with 5,511 votes. Asked whether he was satisfied with the turnout, he said: “It was a free election, and many of my friends voted. Do lawmakers only have a mandate if all voters raised their hand to show support?”
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Some analysts have branded Lam pro-government, as he was appointed by mainland Chinese authorities to sit on Tianjin’s Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the northern city’s advisory body.
In February 2020, shortly after Covid-19 cases first hit Hong Kong, he also warned hospital employees against going on strike to force the government to close the border with the mainland, where the coronavirus was wreaking havoc.
Brushing aside such labels, Lam said he had criticised government policies he considered harmful to society and would continue to do so.
“We’ve always believed that while medical professionals can oppose the government in their free time, they must focus on their patients when they are at work,” he said.
“Hong Kong’s medical system has a lot of problems that need to be solved. The patients’ well-being should be the sector’s common goal, and we should leave the politics for the politicians.”
Pointing out he had also opposed a government bill to make it easier for graduates of non-local medical schools to practice in Hong Kong, he asked: “Does that make me anti-government?”
In part 4 of this six-part series, the Post meets Wendy Hong Wen, of the Election Committee constituency
