Dear Editor,
Last month, many doctors in the public hospitals complained to the Hospital Authority about the unbearable workplace caused by the influx of mainland mothers giving birth in Hong Kong. The Secretary of the Food and Health Bureau, Dr. York Chow, has proposed that the public hospitals should ban all mainland mothers whose husbands are not Hongkongers from delivering in the public hospitals to ensure more resources can be reserved for local pregnant women and reduce the work stress of the medical professionals. This proposal spurs a hot debate in society.
Many people favouring the ban claim that the prohibition can directly ease the burden on the public hospital system. From many news reports, mainland mothers account for about 30% of the total birth rate in Hong Kong, and this results in a greater need for hospital beds for their labour. Banning the intake of mainland mothers can therefore alleviate the demand for such beds in public hospitals, and hence give local mothers more attention from the doctors.
Another advantage of the ban is better government planning of prenatal and postnatal services. As the mainland mothers often arrive at Hong Kong just before labour, it is very difficult for the government to foresee and plan how many resources should be allocated in a certain period beforehand. Owing to an unprecedented influx of pregnant women, the quality of prenatal and neonatal services is difficult to maintain, and there are already cases that the frequency of scanning is reduced from once a week to once a month. This undoubtedly puts local mothers and their children’s health and safety at risk. The ban on mainland mother’s delivery in Hong Kong can therefore reduce sudden and unpredictable medical support for labouring, and hence allow the government to focus more on fostering before-birth screening and after-birth checks.
However, the ban can hardly address the crux of the problem. As many mainland mothers are eager to evade the one-child policy adopted in the mainland, and many of them are financially capable of affording private medical care – some women may even be the spouses of the mainland officials, they have the capability of switching to the non-government aided hospitals for delivery. From many news reports, the scarcity of delivery services in these private hospitals has long persisted, and the situation may be even worse than in their public counterparts. Therefore, posing such a ban is like dumping the burden onto the private hospitals, which have already tons of workload to process before dealing with the additional ones. From this, it is clear that the ban does no help to resolve the problem brought from the influx of pregnant women.
Moreover, the government, as the ultimate provider of the public medical services, have the responsibility to provide services to any patient in Hong Kong. For example, if the delivered babies are found to have serious illnesses in a private hospital, but the mainland mothers cannot afford to continue the medical treatment there, the babies have to be transferred to the public ones, however reluctant the government is in accepting them. Also, if a mainland woman suddenly approaches the emergency department and claims that the amnion membrane has already broken, can the government refuse to admit her? Out of humanitarian considerations, the answer is a definite ‘no’. Hence, the ban is not as effective as many would have thought.
In my view, the ban on mainland mothers giving birth is not only ineffective, it even constitutes discrimination. The government guarantee that no one in Hong Kong should be denied help from the public medical services. But does this statement only apply to Hong Kong permanent residents? Can the government ignore any emergency needs of people who are not Hongkongers? Our government cannot, and should not, be so cold-blooded as to only provide basic medical help to local Hong Kong people, no matter how thorny the current problem is.
I hope the government can scrap the proposal on humanitarian grounds.
Yours faithfully,
Pat Chan