Senior managers at Hong Kong public hospitals may be on hook for blunders

Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority has proposed holding senior managers at public healthcare facilities accountable for blunders that happen on their watch as part of wide-ranging reforms aimed at better defining roles and reducing the risk of potentially life-threatening mistakes.

The authority also suggested on Friday that hospitals make better use of technology to ease the workload of frontline staff after finding they often struggled with implementing mounting sets of guidelines adopted in the wake of blunders.

The recommendations were among 31 put forward after a three-month review by a special committee appointed by the authority to examine its performance.

Authority chairman Henry Fan Hung-ling said he would chair a high-level Governance and Structure Reform Committee under the authority’s board to explore ways to strengthen accountability and governance.

“We first need to define clearly the responsibilities and authorities of different levels of staff,” he said. “But under the current incident-reporting or investigating system, the frontline staff are often blamed. It is not fair. We also need to think whether the senior management should be responsible too.

“I am not suggesting that the senior people will be immediately fired or have to step down once they are found to be responsible. This may not solve the problem.