Prenatal screening for Down's syndrome and community healthcare programmes will be scaled down at public hospitals in response to the manpower shortage crisis, the Hospital Authority chief executive Dr Leung Pak-yin revealed yesterday.
He spoke just hours before the Legislative Council last night passed a non-binding motion urging the government to reform the Hospital Authority.
Dr Leung (pictured) said that his team was working out a package of financial incentives as well as initiatives to reduce doctors' hours which he hoped would receive a positive response at a staff meeting scheduled for next Friday and stop the exodus of doctors from public hospitals.
Doctors have threatened to take industrial action if the authority fails to solve the crisis and have called on the authority to stop increasing the number of beds and to cut non-core services.
'Inevitably we have to slow down some projects such as hospital accreditation and prenatal screening and scale down some community programmes,' Leung said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. 'We also have to consolidate some services to save manpower.'
In reaction to criticisms that the authority has been too aggressive in expanding services, Leung said: 'We always have to strike a balance between services expansion and our manpower supply.'
