TNAG-0976-FCO40-1195-Legislation-for-public-health-and-urban-services-in-Hong-Kon-1980 — Page 112

Background

The Dental Teaching Hospital (DTH) is now nearing completion at Sai Ying Pun. The first group of dental students will commence their training there in September this year and the Hospital will be open to the public from January 1981. The Hospital will accommodate the Dental Faculty of the University of Hong Kong and the teaching facilities will be financed through the University and Polytechnic Grants Committee (UPGC) in the same way as the Medical Faculty of the University at Queen Mary Hospital (MH) (and later the Medical Faculty of the Chinese University at the Sha Tin Hospital).

2

The building of the DTH has been undertaken as a Government project within the Public Works Programme and it was the initial assumption that the operation of DTH, as distinct from the provision of teaching, should be the responsibility of the Medical and Health Depart- ment. The teaching staff of DTH would be University employees, while the remaining staff would then be civil servants employed by the Medical and Health Department.

3

However, the role of DTH differs in one very important respect from that of 2MH. 2MH has a dual role as a teaching institution and as a regional hospital within the public medical service. Furthermore, the Government has other regional hospitals providing the same level of service with which it can be compared for general financial control purposes. Apart from Members' advice in January 1977 that DTH should be open to members of the public on a walk-in basis to ensure that sufficient patients would be available for teaching purposes, DTH has no general dental service function and the limited service element is purely incidental to the teaching function. Furthermore, there is no wholly comparable hospital with which DTH could be compared for general financial control purposes.

Role of DTH and Dental Policy

4

The proposal in the 1974 White Paper on the Further Development of Medical and Health Services in Hong Kong for the establishment of the Dental School is predicated on the need to train dentists for general practice. There was no commitment to provide a public dental service

CONFIDENTIAL

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