Local Services
Our goal is to achieve sustainability through local services, be it through our hospital visits, health checks, or workshops.
As Hong Kong medical students, we aspire to cater to those in need within our proximity, while providing ourselves with experience-based knowledge.
Current Services
Alzheimer's Service Project
The Alzheimers’ disease service is this year’s brand new project for the local team. After visiting the Jockey Club Centre for Positive Aging (JCCPA), we realise that Alzheimer’s’ disease patients, especially those with early-onset, face greater adversities as they often face stigmatisation and receive less support. Therefore, the local team have decided to hold artwork workshops in collaboration with the JCCPA for early-onset Alzheimers’ patients. In each workshop, participants will be asked to create artworks of themes centred around their life stories, such as their occupation, their family, or even recollections of old Hong Kong. The aim of the service is to encourage them to revive and create vivid memories of their lives, as well as to allow them to express their emotions through the artwork.
Asylum Seekers & Refugees
While the exodus of refugees at volatile regions in the Middle East captivates global attention and concern, have we ever realised refugees might just be around us in our daily encounters? Currently, refugees and asylum seekers constitute a population of more than 10,000 people in Hong Kong. They are plagued with the same issues of stigmatisation and deprivation of human rights and access to resources like refugees in any part of the world; Specifically in healthcare, asylum seekers who are not yet officially registered as refugees, usually due to inefficient bureaucracy, cannot receive any government medical care. Even for registered refugees, the costs waived are just enough for routine consultations, instead of more advanced services like dental care or surgeries. Therefore, we currently work with Branches of Hope, a NGO aiming to give equal access to resources and opportunities to all vulnerable and marginalised individuals and communties in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Society of Preventive Dentistry, to offer health talks and health checks to reassure them of their health statuses. We also aim to help refugees to recognise the healthcare resources they are entitled to and how to access them.
Read more about the state of local ASRs on Refugee Union’s website
Donate to Refugee Union’s fundraiser here
Domestic Helper Service
In Hong Kong, healthcare access of domestic helpers should be covered by their employer. However, employers might be unwilling to provide extensive financial support for domestic helpers to conduct health checks and/or doctor consultations, while domestic helpers themselves may avoid seeking for help as well, in fear of causing inconvenience. Therefore, this project aims to improve their accessibility to health knowledge and service. From attending our talks and health checks, domestic helpers will improve their own health and wellbeing, as well as spread the knowledge to their family relatives.
This year, we have carried out a service in collaboration with TCK Learning Centre, a place where domestic helpers go to attend interest classes every Sunday on skills like website design, dressmaking etc. A health talk on joint pain was delivered by Dr. Terence Kwong, then BMI and blood pressure were also measured to identify those who need further medical care.
Homeless Service Trips
Co-launched by MO and the Salvation Army in early 2017, this project offers the opportunity to visit and provide health education with the homeless in the central Kowloon district. In the past year, Team A has gone on 1 homeless visits to distribute essential supplies and COVID information packs, 2 health talks about skin diseases, 1 “real people library” session where we interview a homeless person and gained much insight on how dire the situation was for our service targets. We also invited medical students to join us in 3 kindness walk with Impact HK to distribute daily necessities to the homeless population. Officials had been tightening eviction measures due to complaints from nearby residents, while the temporary closure of many public bathrooms is also a concerning problem, as some homeless people have lost the place for a proper shower.
Through this experience, participants will learn more about the living conditions of the homeless and identify and engage with their needs. Also, they would have the chance to develop more in-depth understanding about the homeless people as well as the related introspection.
Grantham Hospital Service
Since 2010, Medical Outreachers Hong Kong has been collaborating with Grantham Hospital’s Hospice Center to provide palliative service opportunities for medical students. This service project aims to add joy and happiness to the lives of these terminally ill patients, and to accompany them at the end stages of their life journeys. In this programme, participants are provided with unique opportunities to learn and practice their communication skills with terminal patients– a type of clinical exposure that preclinical medical students rarely get.
Since the COVID pandemic, we have suspended this service due to Hospital Authority’s guidelines. However, we still organized a Life and Death Workshop inviting doctors of different specialties to talk about the relationship between patients, doctors and death, aiming to allow medical students to gain a better insight in the world of palliative care and prepare them for our future Grantham Hospital Visits.
Rare Disease Service
This year, Team A was graciously invited to an acapella production by Medici Cantano, to deliver a health talk on music therapy and assist in preparing stimulating knowledge quizzes for patients of Rare Disease Hong Kong. Due to the constraints brought about by the pandemic, unfortunately, we were unable to initiate our initial collaboration with the Hong Kong Children’s Hospital in organising service events. We strive to resume service as soon as the situation improves.