Programme Introduction
In Hospital Authority (HA), there has been a steady increase in the number of cataract patients as well as lengthening of the waiting time for cataract surgery in public hospitals over the past few years. Noting the expanding aging population in Hong Kong, additional funding have had been earmarked by the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2007 for implementing the first pilot private-public partnership (PPP) programme, Cataract Surgeries Programme (CSP), with a view to providing additional cataract surgeries to meet the growing service demand through a PPP delivery model.
Cataract Surgeries Programme
The programme was commenced in February 2008 and has achieved the target of 10,000 cataract surgeries in February 2011. In view of the positive response, additional 3,000 surgeries will be provided in 2011/12. Patients who have been on the HA clusters’ routine cataract surgery waiting lists as at July 2010 and are suitable for local anaesthesia surgeries were invited to participate in the programme, with priority to those who had waited longest on the waiting lists.
Under the programme, participating patients who choose to receive cataract surgeries performed by private ophthalmologists could receive a fixed amount of $5000 subsidy, and may need to co-pay for an amount not more than $8000 for the service package, which consists of one pre-operative assessment, the cataract surgery including intraocular lens, and two post-operative checks.
The programme has gained positive attention and support from the private healthcare sector. 101 private ophthalmologists joined CSP. Amongst a total of 56,406 eligible patients who were invited in thirteen batches, more than 16,458 patients had chosen to participate in the programme, and 12,736 of them had already completed cataract surgeries under CSP as in Dec 2011.
The programme was also largely supported by both patients and private ophthalmologists, as both of them expressed their affirmative views in a survey conducted by an independent market research agency and agreed that the programme could provide more choices to patients and shorten their waiting time to receive cataract surgeries.
CSP provides an alternative for eligible cataract patients to undertake cataract surgeries in private healthcare sector, and helps other cataract patients indirectly by shortening the waiting list and notional waiting time in HA. It also helps address the imbalance between public and private sectors in provision of healthcare services by enabling optimal use of the service capacity in private sector, as well as creating a constructive channel to flow HA patients to the private sector on a voluntary basis through the PPP delivery model.