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How a Hong Kong-run hospital in China offers cure for nation’s sickly, corrupt health care system

University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital practices, such as banning ‘red packet’ payments for appointments, were anathema to other Shenzhen hospitals when it opened in 2012, but they have since copied some of its ideas

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The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital in Shenzhen. Picture: Edward Wong

It wasn’t long after the pioneering University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital first opened its doors in the rapidly grow­ing Chinese border city, five years ago this month, that senior staff realised their challenges would include more than the clinical needs of sick patients.

Professor Lo Chung-mau, the hospital’s chief executive, recalls the day he was threatened with a gun.

Lo was then head of surgical services and was called to the patient relations office to meet a former patient, a police commander, who had made a complaint about her recent thyroid operation, undertaken by one of Lo’s colleagues.

To his astonishment, Lo, who is probably Hong Kong’s most eminent surgeon, was warned by the woman’s angry husband that she had a gun and knew how to use it.

“I told him very calmly that it did not matter to me that his wife used a gun because I was a surgeon and I used a knife,” says Lo, speaking in his seventh floor office, which offers expan­sive views over the modern white hospital buildings to Deep Bay and, visibility permitting, Hong Kong.

Originally from Kent, England, former Naval officer and entrepreneur, Stuart Heaver is a full-time freelance writer and features journalist living and working in Hong Kong. He loves his job, the sea and his family but not necessarily in that order.
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