* Total inpatient, day patient discharges and deaths
2013-14 was a busy year for NTEC with a lot of major initiatives achieved and many important events worthy of celebration.
NTEC faced increasing service demand arising from the surge of cross border population. To meet high demand, the observation ward at NDH was converted to a 20-bed Emergency Medicine ward and a 10-bed paediatric day ward was established at AHNH. The bed capacity in PWH was built up with three additional High Dependency Unit (HDU) beds, a Medical Ambulatory Care Centre with 30 day beds, and an 8-bed ambulatory care unit at the Children Cancer Centre.
To improve the management of specialist outpatient waiting lists, more doctor sessions were added, including 4,200 new cases for Eye Specialist Clinic.
A stable workforce was maintained by NTEC with special concern on the workload of frontline doctors, nurses and allied health professionals. To relieve heavy workload, additional nurses were recruited and frontline allied health professionals were added to enhance support for patients requiring multi-disciplinary care and rehabilitation. More patient care assistants were recruited for allied health departments to share out simple clinical tasks and relieve clerical workload. In addition, the auto-refill service of medical consumables and linen items were implemented in all hospital wards in PWH, SCH and SH to relieve workload of ward staff.
To avoid unnecessary admission, the Cluster successfully implemented psychiatric consultation liaison service in Tai Po district. It was then rolled out in Shatin district with 1,500 psychiatric consultation liaison attendances at the A&E department in PWH for patients with probable mental health problems. Community care for mental health patients was enhanced through case management service for 700 patients with severe mental illness residing in North District. To enhance inpatient psychiatric service, Tai Po Hospital has facilities improved so that recovery oriented treatment programmes could be provided to patients in psychiatric admission wards, which were renovated in February 2014.
To strengthen patient safety and service quality, cancer diagnostic services were enhanced in the Cluster through providing additional cytogenetic tests for blood cancer and predictive molecular tests for lung, breast and colorectal cancers.
2013-14 was a year of celebration in NTEC with PWH and NDH granted full accreditation for four years through staff engagement and teamwork. It was also a remarkable year for Tai Po Hospital, signifying strong partnership with community stakeholders on its 15th anniversary.