Three traditional Chinese medicine experts from the mainland have been supporting integrated care for patients and providing training to local professionals. Photo: Handout

The Hospital Authority is planning to ramp up the collaboration between the two disciplines while 35 local practitioners have joined the city’s first-ever hospital apprenticeship led by their counterparts from mainland China under the Greater Bay Area Chinese Medicine Visiting Scholars Programme launched in November last year.

Three veteran traditional Chinese medicine experts from the mainland, staying in the city for a year, have been supporting integrated care for patients and providing training to local professionals. All three visited Hong Kong during the pandemic to help treat Covid-19 patients.

“We think [this programme] is feasible and will continue to develop. It will not only last for one year. We hope to continue to expand,” said Rowena Wong, the authority’s chief manager for Chinese medicine, adding that the initiative had received support from the Traditional Chinese Medicine Bureau of Guangdong province.

Mainland practitioners from the programme, collaborating with local healthcare professionals, visited seven hospitals, tending to patients requiring treatments for serious Covid-19, stroke, cancer palliative care and musculoskeletal pain management. The team has also started looking into extending the service to respiratory medicine.

Wong said the authority would explore providing the service to other specialties, including oncology, neurology, orthopaedics and acupuncture.

“It will not only be limited to these few specialties. We will continue to see which specialties in Hong Kong are suitable for integrated Chinese and Western medicines,” she said.

The programme also offered the first-ever apprenticeship for local Chinese medicine practitioners to treat hospital patients. Wong said this training would continue to develop in the future.

Under the programme, each mainland expert would lead three to five local practitioners collaborating with Western medicine counterparts to treat patients.

Xie Dongping, one of the mainland experts, said that his local counterparts had a solid foundation of knowledge and could quickly master how to provide care to hospital inpatients, even though they usually treated outpatients.

Xie, a chief doctor from Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine, said he and other mainland experts had served as a “bridge” between practitioners of the two disciplines.

“We are like adhesive agents and a bridge to let Hong Kong Western and Chinese medicine practitioners make more contact over the care of patients in hospitals,” he said.

The experts also said Hong Kong and the mainland had different strengths and could complement each other.

“Chinese medicine practitioners in Hong Kong have a good foundation [of knowledge], the healthcare system here is on par with international standards … these are all things the mainland could learn from,” Xie said.

Professor Zou Xu, chief of a department at the Guangdong hospital, said Hong Kong was better at training for general medicine than the mainland, which was more sophisticated in developing specialties.

Development of Chinese medicine has been one of the major initiatives of the city’s government, with Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu pledging in his maiden policy address last year to deepen the collaboration between Hong Kong and the mainland.

The city’s first Chinese medicine hospital, which will be in Tseung Kwan O, is set to start operating in 2025.