Hong Kong’s public hospitals saw a turnover rate of 6.1 per cent for full-time doctors in 2023, authorities have said as they continued to recruit non-local medics to address the manpower shortage.
A total of 391 doctors retired or resigned in 2023, leaving 6,780 doctors working for the city’s Hospital Authority (HA), the Health Bureau told lawmakers in a written reply on Wednesday.
The bureau also said that the HA had 29,780 full-time nurses last year, with a turnover rate of 9.5 per cent, or 2,559 nurses.
The figures were lower than in 2022, when the city saw turnover rates of 7.1 per cent for doctors and 10.9 per cent for nurses.
The HA had an intake of 630 doctors between April and December last year, according to the Health Bureau.
Tony Ko, head of the HA, told a panel in the legislature on Wednesday that the shortfall of medics had been severe in recent years. But, he added the attrition rate had slowed last year thanks to multiple schemes to facilitate the recruitment of non-locally trained doctors.
Ko added that, as of March this year, there were 138 non-locally trained doctors working for the HA, and that number was expected to grow to 200 by the end of the year.
“For the recruitment of non-locally trained medics, the most important aspect was their standards and abilities to work with us… but so far the results were satisfactory,” he said in Cantonese.
Ko said non-locally trained doctors came from UK, Australia, North America – popular locations for Hongkongers to pursue medical degrees.
They also came from mainland China, he added, as a result of two registration schemes that recognised certain medical qualifications issued by mainland universities and the lifting of Covid-19 travel curbs.
A total of 19 doctors from China were employed by the HA last year, the highest figure since the schemes were introduced in 2021.
Ko said mainland Chinese institutions, such as the Sun Yat-sen University, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, had been approached by the HA with the hope of attracting medical graduates to work in the city.
The HA has launched a series of initiatives to retain medical talent since the attrition rate of medics surged in 2020, including extending the retirement age of doctors and nurses to 65.
Authorities have also held recruitment fairs overseas after an amendment to the Medical Registration Ordinance in 2021 allowed non-locally trained doctors with recognised qualifications to register in Hong Kong after practising in the city for over five years.
According to the Health Bureau, 1,032 doctors resigned from Hong Kong’s public hospitals over the past three years.
Last March, health chief Lo Chung-mau addressed the labour shortage in Hong Kong’s public health sector, saying: “The entirety of Hong Kong faces shortages in the work force. That is, to some extent, due to emigration, as well as many reasons such as the social and political environment.”
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