choice between public vs private hospital

Hi there, For the pass months I've been thinking about whether i should go to public or private hospital for delivery and then just recently I had some experience with public hospital. i want to share with you this experience with public hospital. I was recently admitted to a government hospital for PVB. what i don't like about the service are as follows:

1) The needles they use are thicker than private hospital and it hurts alot when they get blood out of you or do transfusions

2) When getting blood out of you the skill are poor. It hurts so much!! G!

3) The nurses and doctors there are friendly but half of the maids there (the ones who do the cleaning) are mostly rude and treats you as if you a prisoner than a patient. (she watched me as I was changing to my hospital gowns and said this and that!)

4) The gowns they wanted us to wear are poorly designed with knots at the back...I mean how can you sleep on it? i got an allergy from those gowns too.

5) I personally don't like the idea that you need to be test subjects for student doctors to mengle with. I had two student doctors who did ultrasounds on me purely for their own study purpose and not for my benefit at all! When you are in a hospital you'll feel bad already! and it seems like you are just another piece of meat there letting doctors do as they are please to you!! G!

6) They need to take blood sample from you every 3 days! i asked them why and they only said is for getting your blood type really in case you need a transfusion! WHAT!? that's not a good reason?! if i stay there long enough my blood will be all drained out!! They taken more blood from me than what I've bleeded!! G!

7) They never take the time to explain to you what's going on or what's wrong with you!

8) You can't sleep at night because is so damn noisy! and they usually wake you up at 12midnight or 5am in the morning for blood samples! G!


As for private hospital this is what I've heard. A friend of mind had a really bad experience with private hospital. She had a C-section and then had massive bleeding afterwards and the nurses there told her they can't do anything until her "responsible doctor" arrives! I mean what? if you bleed like that you'll die within 10mins or so! How irresponsible can they get? It seems they don't provide emergercy services!

Luckly her friend (a nurse) came and visit her at that time and found out and then screamed out at the nurses there to get emergercy help! Sounds worst than China just leaving people to die like that! After hearing this I'm scared of private hospital too because my private doctor is a really busy man and i fear he can't come and save me in time and I'll die! G!


At the moment I just don't know where to go from here?!

If student doctors didn't train by treating patients in public hospitals, where exactly WOULD they train?

Exactly Burgundy, I know your experience was far from perfect, but that is the price that you pay for going public. Not just in HK, you do have to accept that there may be teams of upto 10 doctors/interns doing rounds and learning from your case. Would you prefer that the fully qualified doctors who treated you had pearned verything from textbooks and the Discovery Channel? In return, you usually get more state of the art facilities than in some private hospitals.


Your friend's experience sounds far from ideal, but does not sound typical. I have been on both sides of the fence and have generally found that for emergency care, a public hospital is the place to go. Once past the critical stage, the standard of care sometimes slides (they have other critical cases to focus on), that is the time that you'd ideally go private to recover. For uncomplicated procedures (including childbirth), I choose a private hospital because I find that I (and my family) recuperate much more quickly in a more comfortable and less stressful environment. I always choose a private hospital within manageable distance of a top notch public facility (in case something awful happens).


The gowns thing is pretty universal by the way. With softer fabric, I guess the ties are not as big a deal, but I think I have always had the aid of an anaesthetic when I was wearing a gown, so sleep was not a problem. As far as the needles thing goes, they have to use different needles to administer different types of medication/tests, so that was not necessarily their fault.

As the others (and in other threads) have said - in an emergency you would probably want to be in a government hospital. Of course the bedside manner of staff tends not to be fantastic, but really, that's not why you go there. I'm sure you have read in the newspapers about the stress these people work under, the long hours while training etc. If you don't want to be seen by medical students you can request that, but again, they have to learn somehow, and they are ALWAYS supervised.

I gave birth at QMH and the birth was a truly horrible experience from start to finish, but I don't really blame the staff for that - I panicked a bit and my partner wasn't particularly helpful, and when repeating the experience we will go in better prepared. And we will repeat it, because ultimately it's only a couple of days, it costs virtually nothing, and at no time did I worry about my health or my baby's. (OK, apart from that 'I'm going to die' phase of labour, but I don't count that...)

Also I have to say that I did have my share of doctors with horribly bad attitudes and bad manners, but this time I hope I will be able to stand up to them better. I don't think this is just in the public sector - there are frankly a lot of doctors around who would be better working in a field without patient contact.

i have experienced both public and private hospitals in hong kong (queen mary/adventist/matilda/hk sanitorium)


my thoughts:


1 & 2) needle skills/abilities rest entirely on the individual. different bloods require different needles/locations, ie: iv's different from bloods. i had over 10 transfusions at the adventist, and they had to call in specialists to do it (head of pediatrics/anasthsiologists and we got charged for their services)...whereas getting the same procedure at queen mary went smoothly the first time the nurse tried.


3) never had the experiences with any of the cleaning staff, i do not speak chinese but everyone always smiled at me and we gestured to talk about babies, health, etc.


4) the gowns are not great, are they? thankfully they don't mind if you bring your own clothes if you are allowed to be wearing them and they dont need access to your body immediately.


5) public hospitals state very clearly that they are learning hospitals. i don't mind helping those kids become better doctors. they are supervised by great professionals and they learn from your situation. just the way the professionals did. it's the circle of life.


6) wow, i never had that explanation!


7) all the doctors in every hospital i have been in hong kong were always excellent in letting me know the situations and probable outcomes. i always found having a list of questions and writing down their answers always helped me be more prepared and remember their answers/time frames, etc.


8) at the matilda i slept very well, and at the other hospitals, i did not. my health/health of my unborn children had a LOT to do with that situation. they're doing their best. bloods do need to be taken in accordance with medication/food requirements, as incovenient as it is to be woken up to have your blood pressure or blood taken, they don't do it just to aggravate you.


your friend's experience sounds absolutley atrocious, and i can tell you i have never heard of another situation like that, being refused treatment until a responsible physician arrived, here in hong kong.


for comfort & flexibility the private hospitals in hong kong will provide you more of that. given your negative experience with the public hospital, you would probably be happier in a private. good luck.

AKKY, your experience sounds so much like mine. I was admitted to the Prince of Wales hospital for bleeding. I had placenta previa. They too had to draw blook once every 3 days because they had to continuous match my blood with what they've got. Sometimes if there was an experienced dr doing it, it was fine but when an inexperienced dr did it, it hurt like anything and would give me a bruise. I stayed for 2 weeks until I delivered my baby prematurely at 33 weeks due to heavy bleeding(but she was very healthy and breathed on her own).

I didn't have a bad experience at the public hospital, however. Yes, we had a busy ward but the patients in the beds around me helped me get up after my c-section. The nurses and doctors were polite and helpful.

They did my c-section really well too. I didn't need painkillers afterwards. My c-section was a success. In fact, I bled less than a normal delivery apparently.

My only negative comments will have to be the trip to the nursery. It's a long way and you can't use the toilets there. If you need to use the loo desperately, you have to walk all the way to the ground floor to their cafeteria. This is not pleasant after your c-section. Okay if you're not desperate but when you are..... the only other thing is that if yours isn't an emergency, you could be scheduled for a c-section in the morning but they may only operate at night because they have emergency cases to handle. It's awful because you can't eat before your c-section and you are forced to starve another half a day. This is not all that bad, however. Mine was an emergency and I thank the dr for attending to me immediately rather than making me wait. The time it took from talking to the dr to the operating theatre was 5 minutes.

Hello, thankyou all for commenting and sharing your experiences. I really apprepriated it.


As with the student doctor thing, i don't mind student doctors learning from my case as long as there is a senior or experienced doctor teaching them while looking into my case. But in my case the student doctors were not "supervised" so it was just me and one student doc alone each time. I even overheard one of them talking on his mobile saying he has a ultrasound exam in the afternoon. I'll feel more comfortable if there were an experienced or senior doctor around to teach them. Then at least I know they have full permission to do this.


to MayC ----> I'm so glad to hear you and your BB is doing ok. I'm abit reassured now because I've got placenta previa (central) too. Thanks for sharing.

AKKY, I remember one time when I was bleeding, a junior doctor ordered "no food" for me and said to me that I needed to be rushed to the delivery room. An experienced dr then came around to check and said it was a false alarm. It was really hard for me because I was already frightened and I didn't like being sent to and from the delivery room. But the experienced doctors you see were student doctors once. My mum (she's a nurse) said that in the past, she had so much trouble drawing blood and now she's the head nurse for a geriatric ward in Sydney. It's horrible to be the "victim" that these inexperienced students train on (I was their victim for 2 weeks pre-op and 1 week post-op) but we must give them a chance :-)


Re: Your previa, there is this forum you could chat on: www.babycenter.com. Search placenta previa. They have the facts and at the bottom, they have people who are going through the same thing.


My baby is going to be 22 months old next week and she's as bright as anything. She goes to playgroup once a week and she's the only toddler who could do most of the actions from songs. She's suffered no effects from her prematurity (born at 33 weeks). When she was born, she was in an incubator for a day (only for observation) before being transferred to a normal nursery. She stayed there for 16 days because she wasn't heavy enough. She was as healthy as a term baby - she only had flu twice in the first 14 months until she started playschool. Then she kept getting sick from other kids (and they too catch each others' germs).


Feel free to pm me if you need to chat about my experience in the public hospital with previa.