14
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
Annually recurrent cost is expected to be about $16 million. The hospital will have a full range of specialist services and will pro- vide a further 1,320 beds. The figure of beds available per head of population should then be not less than 1 to 350, allowing for population expansion and other hospital development.
Government hospitals in all admitted a total of 53,025 patients in 1959, and Government and Government-assisted hospitals, clinics and dispensaries treated a total of 5,107,644 out-patients. The revised estimate of total Government expenditure on medical and health measures for the current financial year 1959-60 is $110 million, or approximately 15.2% of the Colony's total expenditure.
It will be unnecessary to burden the remainder of this Chapter with further figures and statistics: the reader will recall that the purpose of those already given was to illustrate briefly the size of the problem presented by social services in Hong Kong and to show that that problem is being faced energetically and positively. Much more is being done, and the record of this is in other chap- ters of this Report. It is sufficient here to say that Hong Kong is attacking with similar vigour all the other problems which arise from a greatly swollen population, and which require the expan- sion of Governmental services. In sum, the reader, one hopes, will agree that the plans coming to fruition are on a scale which encourages the belief that Hong Kong is at least not losing ground, although clearly it would be quite wrong to claim that solutions to all our social problems are yet in sight.
A word should, perhaps, be said on the financing of these multi- farious operations. This review mentioned earlier that the embargo on trade with China, imposed in the early 1950s as a result of the war in Korea, severely disrupted the local economy and raised grave doubts as to whether the Colony could ever hope to inte- grate the concurrent wave of immigrants into Hong Kong life. In the event the Colony found it possible, although the burden has been heavy, to finance from its own resources the great bulk of the development necessary to pursue this policy. This was possible largely because of a rapid change from an entrepôt to an indus- trialized economy. The opening chapter of the Annual Report for 1958 dealt in detail with the industrial development of Hong Kong, and it is therefore superfluous to recapitulate that story