Doctors at Hong Kong Asia Heart Centre offer surgeries at low cost to ease burden on public health care system amid coronavirus outbreak
- Hong Kong Asia Heart Centre says it will offer heart operations starting from HK$67,000 (US$8,630) to make emergency services affordable to public hospital patients
- It generally charges between HK$100,000 and HK$130,000 for percutaneous coronary intervention, which opens up narrow or blocked blood vessels in the heart
Doctors at a private clinic in Hong Kong will voluntarily perform surgeries at lower fees, as public hospital resources are stretched to the limit to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.
The Hong Kong Asia Heart Centre announced on Tuesday it would provide heart operations starting from HK$67,000 (US$8,630), half of what it usually charged, to make emergency services affordable to public hospital patients.
The service offered is called percutaneous coronary intervention, a procedure that opens up the narrow or blocked blood vessels in the heart.
The clinic’s two leading surgeons will not charge fees for their work, the centre said.
“[Public] hospitals are busy handling the viral outbreak,” Lam Yat-yin, the centre’s director and a consultant at Canossa Hospital, said. “We are trying to help fight the epidemic in our own way.”
Hong Kong’s public health care facilities are facing a growing challenge in handling the outbreak, as the contagion has spread to 49 patients in the city as of Tuesday afternoon and caused one death.
A union of public hospital workers went on strike last week demanding more medical supplies and a full border closure with mainland China, as the outbreak is putting pressure on an already-burdened public health care system.
Private clinics, which handle just 10 per cent of the city’s health services but employs nearly half of all doctors, are stepping up amid the crisis to take some pressure off the public health care system.
The idea to use the centre’s facilities amid the crisis came to Lam when he spoke to his colleagues in the public sector who had been working hard amid the outbreak.
“[Our] friends in the public sector are fighting the disease,” Lam said. “At some stage we thought, ‘what can we do to help’?”
The team of doctors decided to lower prices for the emergency surgery and offer a 24-hour hotline as well as free consultations to patients.
Vincent C.Y. Tsang, associate director of the centre, said the surgeries at their centre would have normally cost anywhere between HK$100,000 to HK$130,000 depending on cases.
“But now, it is more or less comparable to public facilities,” he said.
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The clinic can perform up to 30 surgeries a week, while it currently handles about 10 operations a week, Tsang added.
The Hong Kong Hospital Authority, which oversees public hospitals in the city, announced on Monday that non-emergency services would be reduced to allow employees to “focus on the epidemic”.
The authority added it was planning to send patients from public hospitals to private clinics at public facility prices, as it shifted away from providing non-emergency services and clinical examinations.
It did not respond to a request for comment on how much similar services at a public hospital would cost.
But the centre said its decision was made before the authority’s announcement of sending patients to private clinics.
Another private clinic, the Hong Kong Heart Centre, said the authority recently contacted it for health care services not related to the heart.
“We will do our best to meet their needs,” a spokesperson of the centre said.
