Healthcare sector shake-up

Macau’s medical check-up culture is severely wanting. Since 2007, Macau’s medical labour force has been haemorrhaging workers, as have other sectors, with the croupier orbit sucking in personnel, while local labour laws, which might have been expected to step up to the plate to remedy matters, remain unchanged.
In addition, Macau is facing a spike in local population needs as well as a barrage of travellers impacting medical facilities. There has hardly been any room to breathe for the Health Bureau. Government hospital Conde São Januário – and even private hospitals like Kiang Wu and the Malo Clinic – are hard put to keep pace. The outcome is predictable: a flow of Macau residents to Hong Kong, Thailand or Singapore for advanced medical treatment.
Enter Professor Manson Fok Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST), who has familiarised himself with surgical techniques in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom and practiced medicine for over 30 years.
“We’ve been bringing together Macau’s entire medical community for training with some of the world’s finest doctors,” Prof. Fok tells Macau Business. “From Doctor Susan Briggs at Harvard Medical to Doctor Changqing Gao, Asia’s father of robotic heart surgery and the head of PLA 301 Hospital in Beijing”.
“Macau’s frontline healthcare providers need this training because we’re such a small community. We don’t have a medical board here like they do in Hong Kong. They [Macau healthcare workers] are under enormous pressure in all sectors, so we provide them with free training at our medical skills training lab at MUST’s Faculty of Health Sciences”, he explains.
The full story can be read in this month’s issue of Macau Business magazine, available at newsstands or online at www.magzter.com