The Hospital Authority (HA) values collaboration with the private sector in the provision of healthcare services for its patients. In recent years, there has been increasing opportunities for Public-Private Partnership (PPP). This mirrors a growing trend in many other advanced economies. PPP enables effective utilisation of resources by bringing together the resources and expertise from the public and private service providers and facilitates continuity of care and knowledge exchange through enhanced communication and experience sharing. The combined efforts of the public and private sectors will provide more choices to patients as well as lead to an overall improvement in service quality.

Ensuring an effective flow of patients between HA and the private sector will contribute towards the success of PPP. Consequentially, the sharing of clinical information is an important pre-requisite and hence HA introduced the PPI-ePR Electronic Patient Record and the Collaborative Project to Enhance Information Flow for Referred Patients to the Hospital Authority (auto-reply project) a few years ago. With the Government taking the lead, PPI-ePR will further evolve and serve as the building block for the development of a territory-wide Electronic Health Record (eHR) sharing infrastructure in the coming years.

In line with the Government’s direction, HA has also introduced a number of clinical PPP programmes to enhance healthcare service delivery and patient choice. The Cataract Surgeries Programme aims at shortening the waiting time for cataract surgeries in public hospitals. It has successfully encouraged and facilitated patients in the public sector to receive the surgery in the private sector. A pilot run PPP model is being conducted in Tin Shui Wai as the Tin Shui Wai Primary Care Partnership Project for the delivery of primary care service and promoting the family doctor concept in the community. Partnership with the private sector is being explored for our Specialist Out-patient Clinic (SOPC) service, in which SOPC patients with stable chronic conditions that can be managed at primary care level can be referred to private doctors for follow up. The Haemodialysis Public-Private Partnership Programme (HD PPP) is also being rolled out with the participation of community haemodialysis service providers.

HA is also currently assisting the Government in conducting a business case study for the development of a PPP model for Phase 2 of North Lantau Hospital. A site has been reserved in Tung Chung, Lantau Island for development of the PPP project which is the first of its kind in hospital development in Hong Kong.

As a major participant of the overall healthcare reform agenda in Hong Kong, we will continue to support the policy direction of the Government and actively explore more opportunities for PPP.

This homepage provides information on PPP projects, latest news and related documents. We hope that it will serve as a useful information resource and your valuable comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Dr W L Cheung
Director of Cluster Services Division