Hong Kong East Cluster (HKEC) Session - Medical-social Collaboration

In face of the rapidly ageing population, the demand for elderly and medical services has been rising in recent years. To cope with the ever-increasing service demand, the Hospital Authority’s annual expenditure is expected to continue to increase while it struggles with manpower shortage. Thus, the financial sustainability of HA is greatly challenged. To cope with the fiscal challenges and demand for healthcare services of a greying population, Hong Kong must reform its healthcare system.


Dr CC Lam advocates a paradigm shift of the healthcare system and promotes developing primary healthcare service models that can enhance medical-social collaboration. He will talk about examples of medical-social collaboration, including District Health Centre, the recently proposed model for district-based medical-social collaboration, and strategies that can foster cross-sectoral engagement to enable the elderly to age healthily and stay in the community as long as possible. Through the joint efforts of healthcare and social service providers, synergy can be generated to deliver efficient and holistic care.

Recovery journey of psychiatric patients is rarely simple and straightforward. Due to complexity of mental illness, functional level and carer support are important aspects besides conventional biopsychosocial domains. Treatment plans aim at functional recovery with community reintegration. Taking the opportunities of direction of reduction of long-stay psychiatric patients, and surging demands of psychiatric service, service model of recovery-oriented care, community approach has been adopted for many years. Enhancement and consolidation of community support with collaboration with care-providers in the community is crucial. Taskgroup was set up in 2014 comprising Hospital Authority, Social Welfare Department and major psychiatric NGOs to establish medicosocial collaboration model for mental health. Yet Hong Kong East Cluster (HKEC) has long history and experience collaborating with community partners well before that. Previous piece-meal, project-based approach was reformed and restructured during Community Health Service Planning Workup back in 2005. Besides “Mental Health” being one of the 7 community platforms in HKEC, old age psychiatry (Psychogeriatric Team) is active member of Elderly community platform working with elderly community service providers serving physical and mental health needs of ageing population of HKEC. In the past decade, the Mental Health community platform of HKEC has evolved with establishments of different subspecialty psychiatric services, e.g. substance misuse, Comprehensive Child Development Service, etc. Meeting the challenges of COVID-19 since 2020, various collaboration programmes adopting refined approach have been designed and delivered.

Medical social collaboration intuitively sounds like a good idea, with promises of bridging fragmented systems, patient-centred care delivery and as a sustainable complementary balance for increasingly technology-driven care. Yet, what leadership, structures or processes nurture this ecosystem of health and care providers to adopt a creative mind-set embracing diversity and capable of transforming ideas into action. Ultimately, achieve outcomes which improve patient experience and health.


Hong Kong East Cluster embarked on this journey in 1993, pioneering the first structured medical social collaborative service. Thence, sparkling further inter-sectoral collaborative initiatives which have been show-cased at HKEC's annual community engagement symposium since 2005. Lessons learned from how we transformed our MSC dream into value for patient-centred care, success and failures will be shared.