Zhang Yang

nicolezyyy@163.com

THE University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital (HKU-SZH) has partnered with a team of spine surgeons from Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, aiming to build a world-class medical center for patients of spinal diseases in Shenzhen.

The cooperation is part of the city’s “3R Project” that encourages the introduction of medical experts and resources from outside the city to improve local health-care services. The team of experts from Hong Kong is led by Prof. Kenneth Cheung, director of the orthopedics and traumatology department at Queen Mary Hospital and president of the Scoliosis Research Society.

During a ceremony held at HKU-SZH yesterday to mark the introduction of the Hong Kong expert team, Prof. Cheung said the cooperation between the two hospitals would be rolled out in different stages to improve clinical services, personnel training and medical research related to spinal diseases on both sides.

Prof. Cheung said his team would also introduce Schroth — an exercise therapy that could help scoliosis patients recover without undergoing spine surgery — to the Shenzhen hospital.

“We also want to promote the screening of scoliosis in Shenzhen by using the software SpineScan developed by the University of Hong Kong and Tencent,” he said.

According to the cooperation agreement signed by both sides, remote diagnosis meetings will be attended by doctors from both teams every week, while the two hospitals will jointly host training courses and international academic conferences on spinal lesions each year.

Additionally, Prof. Cheung and his team will come to HKU-SZH on a regular basis to offer diagnosis and treatment for patients of spinal diseases. Prof. Cheung will perform 50 spine surgeries and his team members will perform 250 spine surgeries at HKU-SZH each year.

The department of orthopedics at HKU-SZH received 56,000 outpatient visits last year, and the hospital’s osteogenesis imperfecta multidisciplinary treatment center has received 150 patients since the center was set up two years ago.

According to data provided by the hospital, the prevalence of scoliosis is around 2 to 3 percent in Shenzhen, meaning that there are over 300,000 scoliosis patients in the city.