7 -
Thursday, May 25, 1972
"Listening to Professor King and Professor Chun recount the
fifty-year history of the Tsan Yuk Hospital, I am struck by the way this
institution has responded to the far-reaching changes in our community.
"Fifty years is not a span of time beyond our conception. Indeed
it falls within the lifetime of many of us here, as we can see from the
presence today of the hospital's first Matron, Miss Leung.
"But in that period the pattern of life in Hong Kong has altered
almost as radically as the practice of medicine itself.
Pace
"The Tsan Yuk Hospital has done more than keep pace with these
changes, It has also been responsible, to a large extent, for educating
the community to adopt enlightened new social attitudes towards maternity
and child care.
"It has earned the trust and confidence of its patients and taught
them to accept ideas often diametrically opposed to any they had previously
And it has done this so quietly, with such sympathy and understanding,
as to leave us unaware of the revolution that has taken place.
held.
"The declining mortality rate which Professor Chun has quoted
underlines the extraordinary advances made in medical care over the last few
decades. We now have over 16,000 hospital boda compared with less than
2,000 in the 1930's.
"The annual death rate per thousand has reduced from 21 to 5 over 50
years. The infant mortality rate has reduced from 350 per thousand in the
1940's to 18 per thousand in the 1970's. The maternal and peri-natal mortality
rates have dropped considerably to their present levels of 1.4 per 10,000 and
16.6 per 1,000.
"These figures