Round

You may think my concern about the trading hour of HKSE rather irrelevant to practising doctors.

On that, you are wrong.

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Around the same time when HKSE announced the news, it has been proposed that all of us should do ward round twice daily - in order to hasten the discharge of our patients and shorten their hospital stay.

I consider that an ingenuous (oh, sounds like ingenious, but in reality not) idea. To say the least, I don't think doing ward round more frequently would enhance diuresis for patients with heart failure, or hasten resolution of bronchospasm for those with asthma, or shorten the course of antibiotics or heparin.

Well, maybe our extraterrestrial friends wish to manage the hospital as a poultry farm. You know what. If you keep hens for laying eggs and bring them up under ordinary sunlight, they will give you an egg each day. However, if you try altering their biological clock and keep them under artificial light of gradually shortening diurnal cycle, they would eventually lay an egg every 12 hours - although the products would be somewhat smaller and with a thinner shell.

No wonder our doctors of the younger generation keep running around like chickens with no head.