First off, I need to explain that I have a graduate degree in health care executive administration…read morefrom one of USA's top universities, with about 17 years of experience in the hospital field. so the below review is not coming from someone who is not familiar with hospitals and emergency department operations. I've worked both in emergency ambulance services, as well as the hospital side of things.
I'm giving this a 3-star review for lack of a better opinion. I come to HK multiple times a year for business and this time I happened to get sick with a lung infection, and suddenly in the middle of the night I lost my ability to speak and started coughing vehemently. Looked up emergency services and this was one of the closest. It's a huge hospital and the facilities are pretty clean. But the emergency department nurse told me there's a wait time of AT LEAST 8 hours. That's really the longest I've seen someone have to wait. I understand an emergency department needs to triage, and yes, of course there were cases that were more critical than me. But I also expect a public hospital to be staffed well enough to not have patients waiting for over an hour or two. The nurse suggested that I try a private hospital, which I did, not wanting to wait (at least) 8 hours and miss my next day's business meetings. So I took her advise, and waited about 10 minutes at a private hospital close by, got examined for less than 5 minutes from the on-duty physician, and was on my way out of there with medicine in hand (antibiotics, cough medicine, and masks to avoid getting others sick) in under 1hr.
I'm sure having a couple additional on-duty physicians to take care of cases that are quick and simple will go a long way to quickly solve this issue.
