Kwai Chung’s Princess Margaret Hospital and Tuen Mun Hospital were the worst in performing surgeries in 2014, according to the Hospital Authority’s (HA) latest report.
The Public Hospitals Surgical Outcomes Monitoring Report 2014/15 states that the Princess Margaret Hospital had the highest ratio of unexpected fatalities for emergency operations while Tuen Mun Hospital ranked the worst in scheduled operations. Wan Chai’s Ruttonjee Hospital was considered the best.
The problem at Princess Margaret Hospital was explained as a result of extra surgeries being transferred from other hospitals, said the director of the HA’s Surgical Outcome Monitoring and Improvement Programme Professor Paul Lai Bo-san, according to Apple Daily. The HA started moving complicated operations, such as vascular surgeries, to Princess Margaret Hospital about two years ago due to unsatisfactory results at other facilities. Lai said that the HA has no intention to change the current way of centralising vascular patients at Princess Margaret.
The poor performance of Tuen Mun Hospital was not explained in the report.
The report covered 17 public hospitals’ general surgery departments, measuring their surgical performances. It recorded around 19,000 emergency surgeries and 5,600 scheduled surgeries in all the hospitals between 1 July 2014 and 30 June last year. Fatality rates for both scheduled and emergency operations fell compared to 2013, the report said.