Can and should Hong Kong, city of queues, embrace medical tourism?

Late last month, on the TVB show Straight Talk, Dr Dennis Lam Shun-chiu, the ophthalmologist founder of C-MER Eye Care and a legislator, discussed two sectors close to Hongkongers’ hearts: tourism and medical services. His message was surprising. Proposing that Hong Kong bundle the two types of services to catch up with Thailand and Singapore, he said: “Medical tourism is very important for the whole society, because you bring in a lot of new revenues, from tourism or from the medical work, and also it’s a great contribution to the growth of the medical community.” Considering that Hong Kong does not have a spotless track record of either managing tourism or providing medical services for its ageing population, however, it is hard to believe that something positive can come out of rolling the two into one service package. In pre-pandemic times, the city’s failure to manage the influx of visitors and traders from the mainland fuelled resentment among residents and triggered protests. Earlier this year, as Hong Kong scrapped anti-pandemic measures and tourism resumed, so did complaints about jam-packed streets in To Kwa Wan, where busloads of tourists waited to have lunch. During the recent “golden week” holiday around Labour Day, the city received more than 1.71 million visitors in the five-day period ending last Wednesday, of whom 625,000 were mainland tourists. Naturally, there were long queues everywhere. People waited to board trams and to enter luxury stores, Ocean Park, the Hong Kong Palace Museum and M+. Crowds formed at the Central piers to take the ferry to Cheung Chau. Droves of tourists in Tsim Sha Tsui tried to buy tickets at the Star Ferry Pier. Invisible queues drove up hotel prices, such that a room in Chungking Mansions was going for HK$6,364 a night. Ouch. Although unbearable at times, long lines of tourists are hardly life-threatening. Long queues at Hong Kong’s public hospitals, on the other hand, could kill. Last month, a 58-year-old woman died after a 12-hour wait at Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital for emergency treatment for her fever and cough. She was found unresponsive inside a toilet for the accident and emergency waiting hall. The next morning, the estimated waiting time for A&E treatment at 11 of Hong Kong’s 18 public hospitals stood at more than eight hours; at three other hospitals, the wait was estimated to be more than seven hours. Wiser healthcare spending starts with how we pay public doctors Long waits in emergency rooms might not even be the biggest problem with Hong Kong’s medical sector. Consider the waiting times for a first appointment at a specialist outpatient clinic in public hospitals for patients in a stable condition. According to the Hospital Authority, for the year that ended on March 31, the longest wait was a staggering 216 weeks to see an eye doctor in Kowloon West. Long waiting times at public hospitals have been attributed to an acute manpower shortage. In 2021, the government noted that, overall, Hong Kong’s doctor-patient ratio of 2 doctors per 1,000 population lagged behind that of Singapore (2.5), the United States (2.6) and Australia (3.8). The Healthcare Manpower Projection 2020, forecast a shortage of 1,610 doctors in 2030. The Straight Talk host, Dr Eugene Chan Kin-keung, didn’t ask Dr Lam about the 216-week wait for an eye specialist appointment. But Dr Chan did ask Dr Lam to comment on the case of the woman who died while waiting for emergency care. Dr Lam answered that “it’s a tragedy that should not have happened”. He said the healthcare system had “room for improvement”, and suggested filling “gaps” by using technology such as artificial intelligence. Hong Kong has also struggled in the past with an influx of medical tourists, such as those seeking the HPV vaccine in 2018. Dr Lam was asked if integration with the rest of the Greater Bay Area would put a bigger strain on medical services. He said: “This is an issue that we have to face, but I believe we can have solutions.” Would one of these solutions involve using a technological marvel to combine long lines of tourists with long queues of patients and shorten waiting times all around? The tourists who endure long waits, chaos and expensive hotel rooms can only hope. So would the residents of neighbourhoods where tourist traffic has been noisy and disruptive, and patients waiting for more than four years to see an eye specialist. April Zhang is the founder of MSL Master and the author of the Mandarin Express textbook series and the Chinese Reading and Writing textbook series