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The Bauhinia Foundation Research Center (Bauhinia) estimated Hong Kong’s PHC spending
in their study report Enhancing Hong Kong primary healthcare with additional resources and
expanded channels by simply summing up the entire expenditure for ambulatory healthcare
providers (HCP.3) and preventive care providers (HCP.6) (Bauhinia, 2019). One significant
pitfall of this simplified method is that the PHC spending estimate also includes
specialised outpatient curative care (HCF.1.3.3), which consists of i) specialised
outpatient care, and ii) ambulatory health care (HCP.3) and preventive care (HCP.6) and leads
to an overestimation of PHC spending in Hong Kong. At the same time, this PHC spending
estimate did not account for key items (e.g. medical goods provided outside health care
services; health system administration and government costs) that, according to the WHO
2019 definition (Box 3.5), should be considered in PHC spending estimations. The omission
of these items could lead to an underestimation of PHC spending. Figure 3.10 provides a
visualisation of discrepancies between the WHO 2019 definition for PHC spending and the
method adopted for estimating PHC spending by Bauhinia (Bauhinia, 2019; WHO, 2019).

Using the same methodology adopted by Bauhinia, we calculated Hong Kong’s PHC
expenditure over the last three years (2017/18, 2018/19, and 2019/20) using data extracted
from the Hong Kong DHA. Findings show that the percentage of Hong Kong’s PHC
expenditure dropped slightly from 27.5% of the current health expenditure in 2016/17 to
26.2% in 2019/20, lower than the average expenditure of 54% across 88
countries, as analysed in the 2019 WHO report (WHO, 2019). Meanwhile, the proportion of
private PHC expenditure was estimated to be 66.2% of the total PHC expenditure in 2019/20,
dropping from 75.1% in 2016/17 (Figure 3.7 and Figure 3.8), a higher percentage than
that of various other OECD countries (Figure 3.9) (Bauhinia, 2019).

Figure 3.7

Hong Kong PHC expenditure as a percentage of current health
expenditure from 2016/17 to 2019/20

28.5%
28.1%
28.0%
27.5%
27.5%
27.0% 26.8%
26.5%
26.2%
26.0%
25.5%
25.0%
2016/17 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20

Source: FHB, 2021a

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