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China’s aim to integrate Greater Bay Area comes together with Hong Kong health care providers playing a leading role

  • The inclusion of Hong Kong-based health care providers in mainland’s insurance network is likely to spur cross-border flow of talent in the Greater Bay Area
  • Availability of world-class medical services and education is crucial in attracting Hong Kong residents to live and work in the bay area

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Illustration: SCMP
Eric Ng
Quality HealthCare Medical Services’ centre in downtown Guangzhou is like any other privately run facility. Patients coming in and out of doctors’ offices, busy nurses and pharmacists carefully checking medical prescriptions before handing out the drugs.
But there’s something else that sets the Hong Kong-based operator of multi-specialty medical centres apart. In January, it became the first foreign-owned facility in the Greater Bay Area to qualify for direct reimbursement by mainland China’s national health service, a crucial step towards lifting the quality of mainland’s health care services and attracting Hong Kong residents to live and work in this cluster of 11 cities in southern China.

“It was a key milestone for us, as it signified our integration into a system our core target customers in the mainland are familiar with, which would enhance their confidence in a foreign supplier like us,” said Elaine Chu, general manager of Quality HealthCare, in an interview at her office in Kowloon Bay.

The Bupa-owned company’s inroads into the fast-growing region of 70 million people – more than the population of Great Britain – represents another step in Hong Kong’s integration with the Greater Bay Area, whose estimated annual output of US$1.5 trillion in 2017 was about the size of the South Korean or Russian economy.

For Bupa, a UK-based multi-medical and insurance group with about £12.9 billion (HK$123.5 billion) in annual revenue, it is a crucial access to what could be the biggest health care market in the world in the next decade.

It is a vital piece in Beijing’s policy goal towards making the Bay area – with all the basic necessities from education to health care and mobility – more convenient and liveable for migrants, including Hongkongers. From China’s perspective, the inclusion of providers such as Quality HealthCare in the health insurance network of Guangzhou – the capital of Guangdong province – would help lift the level of development of the entire region.

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