Mainland Chinese Pregnant Women Jumped Queue and Caused Hong Kong Mother’s Miscarriage

This is the headline of Hong Kong The Sun on Feb 12nd 2012.

Private hospitals Only Care about Money. Local babies are treated like dirt.

Double Negative (*both the woman and her husband are Mainlanders) Women Jumped Queue and Caused Hong Kong Mother’s Miscarriage

A 30 year-old first time expectant mother, who reserved for pregnancy check and doctor appointment in St Paul’s Hospital during the end of November 2011, was neglected and treated coldly for many times by medical staffs. Even though her body showed signs of abnormalities, they ignored it and just urged her to pay for the bed reservation fee. The neglect of her abnormal secretion leaded to her miscarriage. In her online complaint letter, she condemned the hospital for giving priority to Mainland pregnant women, who were accompanied by ‘birth agents’ and leaving her bleeding for 4 hours during her miscarriage. This makes her feel the worthlessness of being a local Hongkonger. She has sent complaint letters to St Paul’s Hospital and Hospital Authority. The scandal was revealed to the Facebook group “Oppose to the Influx of Mainland Chinese Pregnant Women to Hong Kong. Show HKSAR Government with 100,000 Likes“, which has 110,000 members now.

Mother S described her painful experience in St Paul’s Hospital in a letter online. On the day while she was making appointment with a doctor from the obstetrics and gynecology department, she started to has little brown secretion from her uterus. However, nurses in there ignored it totally. They could not stop reminding her the bed reservation for June 2012 is full and urged her to pay for bed reservation fee as soon as possible.

Since there were too many patients, she had to wait for 3 hours before she could see the doctor, who told her she was 5 weeks pregnant simply by calculation and without performing any examination. She later had ultrasound. No gestational sac was found and only the wall of the uterus thickened. The doctor just took blood test and examined her hormones to see if she were pregnant.

Next day, mother S found that her secretion changed from little brown to red. She received notification from the doctor that confirmed her pregnancy and required her to retake blood test as her situation was not good.

On day 3, Mother S was shocked by her bleeding and called the hospital for emergency appointment. A nurse replied her coldly, “emergency ward has no gynecologist. It’s useless to go there.” She even suggested mother S to go to the emergency ward of public hospital. In the afternoon, she found herself miscarriage while she was going to the toilet. She was asked to take photos of the tissues and appointed to see doctor at night.

After her arrival, the whole waiting room was full of ‘birth agents’ distributing business cards. In her 4 hours of wait, many Mainland pregnant women who were accompanied by their ‘birth agents’ jumped queue. She said angrily, “I feel so hurtful. I am a local Hongkonger and willing to pay for private medical service. I can tolerate waiting if I am healthy. However, my embryo had problem. Why couldn’t I get proper care by Hong Kong medical staff? Half of the patients were healthy Mainlanders waiting to have prenatal checkups. Why were I arranged after them when I was bleeding? ”

4 hours of waiting only exchanged for 2 minutes of meeting, and that was just the confirmation of her miscarriage, the giving of prescription and the reminding of next blood test. This is the first time I feel I am worthless. All I feel is helpless. This is the first time that I feel the change of medical staffs in private hospitals. I am absolutely disappointed.

The letter got more than 1,800 concerns and more than 220 comments. Most netizen feel angry, heartbroken and helpless after reading her experience. There are netizen who even shared the same pain with her. They condemn that private hospitals are snobbish, only care about money and have no ethics. Some netizen criticized the government in a very harsh tone, “it is the fault of the government. If they stopped giving double negatives birth certificates, local pregnant women would not be this helpless.”