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Ella Lee

Some public doctors are boycotting the Hospital Authority's work hours survey, saying that the exercise is 'cheating the public' with untrustworthy statistics. 
The anger over the continuing survey comes  at a time when a serious shortage of personnel at public hospitals has caused doctors to threaten to take industrial action over long work hours and heavy workloads. 
The doctors say the authority should shelve the survey if it is to  be used as an important tool to understand frontline working conditions. The authority wants to cut the weekly working hours of its 5,000 doctors to fewer than 65. 
The doctors said the survey failed to show the number of hours they were called back to hospitals after their normal work hours. 
Also, it calculated an average of work hours across 24 weeks, including public holidays and some of the doctors' leave. 
In some clinical departments, clerical staff had to fill in the forms for the survey without checking with doctors to see how long they actually worked. 
Dr Loletta So Kit-ying, president of the Public Doctors' Association, said the survey was misleading because some departments only reported doctors' work hours as recorded on rosters. 
Most medical officers at the internal medicine departments worked 75 hours a week, but the survey's calculations to date showed 62 hours instead, So said. 
'Most medical officers start at 8am and leave after 7pm, but the rosters only show they work 9am to 5pm,' So said. 
'The authority should show the real  situation to the public or it should stop doing the misleading survey.'
A previous survey in December 2009, of 252 doctors from 10 specialties, showed that only 4.8 per cent of public hospital doctors worked more than 65 hours a week, compared with 18 per cent in September 2006. 
Dr Ernie Lo Chi-fung,  past president of the Frontline Doctors' Union, said it was an open secret that the survey had been inaccurate. He said many doctors did not take the survey seriously. 
'It is a public relations tool used by the authority to convince the media and the public that things are improving, but it is not true,' Lo said. 'Many doctors have stopped reporting their work hours to the survey. They all know it is a figures game.' 
Dr Peter Pang Ka-hung,  a neurosurgeon at Yau Ma Tei's Kwong Wah Hospital, said he and some colleagues had boycotted the survey. 
'We have refused to do the survey. Our department asks the clerical staff to do that for us. We don't want to cheat the public together with the authority,' Pang said. 
The survey did not record the time he was called to emergency operations after a full day of work, he said. Although he worked almost 100 hours a week in some busy periods,  his weekly working hours as reported in the survey were much shorter, sometimes only 48 hours. 
The authority has promised to address a manpower shortage with a package of improvements by March 18, including creating more senior posts for doctors. 
An authority spokesman said yesterday that it relied on department heads to verify the data. 
A person familiar with the situation said: 'We cannot go down to each department to check each doctor's work hours. We hope the data reported to us are accurate, but if some doctors do not report the data, it is outside our control.'
Medical sector legislator Dr Leung Ka-lau  will move a motion tomorrow  calling for the authority to introduce standard work hours for doctors. 
He also criticised the authority's use of resources, noting that the number of public doctors had risen by a third - from 3,979 in 1999 to 5,278 in 2009 - but the number of patients discharged by hospitals  rose only 10 per cent and attendance at specialist outpatient clinics just 17 per cent.
'There has been a sharp increase in doctors' manpower in the past 10 years but the services volume did not increase that much,' Leung said. 'And doctors' working conditions remain very poor. We have to ask where the authority has spent its money.'
Since the authority said  doctors worked an average of 51 hours per week, Leung said, it should set the standard working hours at this figure and compensate for overtime on that basis.
Uneven increase
The number of public doctors rose by a third in the 10 years to 2009
But  legislator Dr Leung Ka-lau says the number of patients discharged  by hospitals in that period only rose by: 10%



Doctors boycott 'misleading' survey of work hours