HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 15 March 1989 香港立法局——————— 一九八九年三月十五日
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Sir, such a reorganization will not only confuse the management of the hospital and clinical services further. It is bad as it is! It would also involve the use of large sums of the taxpayers' money. This is why I have objected to the paper circulated to members of the Finance Committee. This split into two departments, we are given to understand, will in effect require a duplication of the senior posts of Director, Deputy Director, and a few senior administrative, executive, and accounting personnel, a team of clerical workers as well as office premises.
If you ask any layman how much he understands the functions of a general out-patient clinic and why he attends one, the simple answer is that he is ill and requires the diagnosis and medical treatment. Ask any hospital doctor whether the treatment at the out-patient clinics affects his work in hospitals, he would tell you that good treatment received there reduces the number of patients requiring hospital admissions. My question to Government therefore is, why should such clinics be operated by the Department of Health Services, whose justifiable existence is the maintenance of good health in a person who is not sick in the first place. To say that the clinics exist to survey the rise and fall of infectious disease is nonsense as this is already being done by a network of private medical practitioners and hospital doctors who are legally bound to do so. It is therefore reasonable for some to suspect that, for all purposes, this is no more than a ploy of those remaining in the future Health Services Department to maintain the size of a shrinking department.
Sir, to allow the public to know more about the basis of such a split, I apologize that I must go back a little in history. In doing so, I must be frank to say that in my opinion, Government has pre-empted the setting up of a hospital authority even before a steering committee was set up to review hospital services.
Whether it is because the inadequacy of the medical and health services has become so obvious that Government wants to remove this eyesore segment from the public venue of the Legislative Council or whether with the development of representative government there is a general trend towards budding off major service areas into independent authorities, I would abstain from commenting except to say that, to realize the spirit of representative government, the councils of such independent authorities should consist of elected members and officials should be in attendance only.
My earlier statement that Government has pre-empted the setting up of a hospital authority prior to the setting up of a steering committee to review hospital services is not without basis. Firstly, if Government genuinely wanted to review medical services as a whole, as it should have, since admittedly it was
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