Hong Kong College of Family Physicians

February is the month of joy as Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival. However, we are deeply saddened by the loss of Dr. Pun Chiu On, the late husband of our long serving Council member, Dr. Mary Kwong. Dr. Pun was the President of the Hong Kong College of Cardiologists and he had been instrumental in helping our CPR Subcommittee for years. I can vividly remember the kind and gentle Dr. Pun when we met at the College’s annual dinner a few years back. My thoughts and prayers are with Mary and her family. Please accept our deepest condolences.

Recently the Hong Kong Medical Association has resolved to set up a task force on exploring the possibility of establishing a College on Primary Care. Promoting Family Medicine and Primary Care together with improving the quality of Primary Care for the public has always been the prime mission of The Hong Kong College of Family Physicians. Furthermore, as one of the constituent statutory Colleges under the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, we strive to improve the health of the public through establishing standards for the training, certification, continuous medical education and professional development of Primary Care doctors, promoting research in Primary Care and collaboration with other specialties.

While we welcome endeavours to promote Primary Care, we cannot support the idea of establishing a new College of Primary Care because of, but not exclusive to, the following reasons:

(1)	The Hong Kong College of Family Physicians has always been promoting Primary Care and its professional development in Hong Kong. There is no justification to form another body with duplicating roles.

(2)	The Hong Kong College of Family Physicians is the statutory Academy College charged with the duty to assure the standard and provide training in Family Medicine and Primary Care. We have already in place a variety of medical educational programmes to cater for the different levels of needs of education for primary care doctors, from Certificate of Family Medicine programme, Diploma In Family Medicine course, a Fellowship examination for assessing standards, up to a recognized training pathway to specialist level in Family Medicine. All registered doctors in Hong Kong are welcome to take part in the aforementioned programmes.

We welcome any organisation to support our educational programmes and we are happy to liaise with them in jointly developing other Primary Care educational programmes under the umbrella of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine.

The Board of Diploma in Family Medicine has been running a certificate course in Shunde, Guangdong. We have received very positive feedback from Shunde. The course uses role play and small group discussion to enhance the learning. They view the enthusiasm of the tutors as contagious and the learning atmosphere is lively. Well done to Dr. Simon Au and his team.

Not long after this, we received another great feedback from the Health Committee in Henan, China. Their members had attended the Cross Strait Conference 2014 in Hong Kong. If you still remember, everyone was given a book 家庭醫生 100篇 published by the College. The conclusion of this book is the strengthening the training and services of primary care will enhance the trust of general public towards primary care doctors and shift the congestion and burden from hospitals back to the rightful community clinics. This will in turn build a strong foundation for a successful healthcare pyramid. I take my hat off and salute Henan! Well done to Dr. Mark Chan, Dr. Ngan Po Lun and their team in publishing this book. If you don’t have a copy, please contact the College Secretariat.

Dr. Angus M W CHAN
President

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