One hundred non-locally trained doctors are expected to join the city’s public hospitals system under Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority amid a manpower shortage among medics.
The authority’s Chief Manager Larry Lee, a chief manager at the Hospital Authority, said during a meeting on Wednesday that he was “confident” that 100 overseas doctors would join the Hospital Authority following its recruitment efforts to address the “urgent situation.”
Among the 100 doctors recruited, around two-thirds were from the UK while the remaining were from countries such as Australia. They were expected to arrive in Hong Kong in batches from September, Lee said.
The doctors will be assigned to various specialties, including departments with tighter manpower such as internal medicine, surgery, anaesthesiology, and radiology, the Hospital Authority said in a response to HKFP.
Hong Kong has undertaken measures in recent years to tackle the manpower shortage in the medical sector, including relaxing rules for admitting overseas doctors to work in public hospitals. Authorities have also been holding job fairs in Australia and the UK to attract graduates to work in the city in the past months.
The city introduced a “limited registration” policy in 2011, granting qualified overseas doctors a renewable three-year contract that allows them to practice in Hong Kong without taking a licensing exam.
In 2021, the government launched another new pathway for qualified doctors graduating from recognised overseas medical schools to be “specially registered” in Hong Kong, also without taking a licensing exam. Those who have worked in public hospitals as part of the new pathway for five years can then become full registered, allowing them to enter private practice.
The two schemes are open to both Hong Kong residents and non-Hong Kong residents.
Of the 100 overseas doctors expected to arrive in Hong Kong, most of them pursued the limited registration path.
High attrition rate
Hong Kong has seen a significant manpower shortage among medics in recent years.
The Hospital Authority announced in late June that the attrition rates of doctors and nurses in the year 2022/23 were 7.1 per cent and 10.9 per cent respectively. Allied health staff, a term referring to health professionals such as occupational therapists, clinical psychologists and dieticians, also saw a high attrition rate of 8.4 per cent.
Secretary for Health Lo Chung-mau said earlier this month that more Hong Kong doctors in their 30s have been leaving the city’s public hospitals to join private health care practices, exacerbating the existing shortage of medics in the public sector.
Aside from recruiting overseas doctors, the Health Bureau proposed amending the Nurse Registration Ordinances in March to launch a new pathway for non-locally trained nurses to work at the city’s public hospitals.
However, lawmakers raised concerns over how to monitor the qualifications of those nurses.
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