The compass of healthcare planning

Gordon Chan Ying-kit
Senior Statistical Officer
Prince of Wales Hospital (Formerly in Hospital Authority Head Office)

It takes a few years to as much as over a decade to establish a hospital and train a healthcare professional. The whole process involves detailed planning in advance. The Statistics and Workforce Planning Department serves as the compass, guiding HA to pinpoint major directions in future service development.

One of the Young Achievers of the year is Gordon Chan, who majored in geography at university, took up a summer job at the Statistical Unit of HA and eventually joined the organisation upon graduation. He made good use of his expertise in geography, combining the X-Y coordinates of patients’ residence and technology to set up a geographic information system (GIS). Other colleagues can insert information at a particular region on the map, such as the usage of HA services, projection of population growth and ageing, as well as road network distance, to assist the planning of healthcare services and allocation of facilities after data integration and analysis, so that citizens in different districts can enjoy healthcare services pertinent to their needs.

Gordon recalls, “The most unforgettable experience is that we were unable to carry out GIS analysis in planning the acute hospital in Kai Tak development area because we only had the engineering drawing of that area. Therefore, I drew each and every street manually in the system using the shortest possible time and combined it with the data we had on hand to analyse the routes to the hospital, as well as predict the number of beds and workforce required.” He sees statistics as the foundation of healthcare planning. Only when the necessary statistics are gathered and analysed can the department start to form long-term planning, project the demand for services from citizens and consolidate the medical architecture for better service quality. He has even enrolled himself in Master of Statistics programme to better equip himself for challenges ahead.

Not only has Gordon found his career path in HA, but he has also found his significant other here. Although his wife and he had met since young, they did not have much contact until both joined HA where they had more opportunities to get along with each other and eventually tied the knot to form a happy family of four.