The Hospital Authority will review nurse workload to garner reasonable nurse-patient ratios in hospitals. This was the message from the authority's Chief Executive Shane Solomon in his keynote speech at the authority's convention today.

He said the authority has done the technical work and gained a consensus on what the workload should be. With a promising outlook in the supply of nurses in the coming years, he is confident their workload will be brought to more reasonable level.

"For doctors we have started to address this through the Doctor Work Reform programme which has reduced the proportion of doctors working over 65 hours from 18% to 5%. We still have more work to do to reduce continuous working hours."

Electronic health records

Mr Solomon said by the end of 2013-14 the electronic health record sharing platform will be ready for connection with all public and private hospitals. By 2018-19 Hong Kong residents will have their own personal health records, covering both the authority and private sectors.

"This is one of the world's first. Patients need information to manage their own health and to make choices about treatment. The Electronic Health Record will help empower people," he added.

On the issue of reducing waiting time, Mr Solomon said a multi-pronged effort will be needed.

"First, the extra funding from the Government will increase the number of patients treated, and our Pay for Performance system provides the incentive to treat more patients through targeting areas of long waits."

The authority is also working on new service performance pledges, in consultation with clinician colleagues. It is working on new Key Performance Indicators for waiting times, such as for joint replacements and cataracts.

Other initiatives

New patient empowerment programmes will be offered focusing first on diabetes and hypertension. Nurse and allied health clinics will continue to help people manage their chronic illness. In 2009-10 the programme provided more than 47,000 attendances

Forthcoming quality improvement initiatives include the Inpatient Medication Order Entry system, filmless radiology and a Crew Resources Management System. The Hospital Accreditation Programme will spread to all the major hospitals over the next few years and the HA-wide Patient Satisfaction Survey will be piloted this year.

He said the 2D bar coding system has been created to ensure correct patient identification in specimen collection. After eight months of implementation in seven hospitals, the misidentification error has reduced by 77% per month.

"In the past two years the number of medication incidents reported through our Advanced Incident Reporting System have dropped 13%."