Hong Kong Pledges Public Answers After 24 of 28 Hospital Lifts Fail

Hong Kong's development minister has promised the public a full explanation of how a brand-new hospital building ended up with broken and unusable lifts. Queen Mary Hospital's new 34-storey clinical block has 28 lifts, but 24 of them have been deemed unfit for use — meaning patients, doctors and staff are navigating a very tall building with only a handful of working elevators.

Development Secretary Bernadette Linn Hon-ho said she would get to the bottom of what went wrong. "Why did those issues occur with the lifts? When were those problems identified, or why have they not been identified yet?" she asked on a television programme. All of that, she said, will be detailed in a report her bureau will submit to Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu within a month, and that report will then be shared with the public.

But Linn stopped short of confirming whether she would invoke the Heads of Departments Accountability System — a mechanism introduced in last year's policy address that lets senior officials be held personally responsible for failures in their departments. She stressed that the first phase of the follow-up investigation has already begun, suggesting the process is moving but leaving open the question of who, if anyone, will be held accountable.

For ordinary Hong Kong residents, this is about more than lifts. A new hospital block is expensive public infrastructure, and if most of its elevators don't work, that raises obvious questions about construction quality, oversight and whether taxpayer money was well spent. It also matters practically: a hospital that can't move patients, equipment and staff efficiently is a hospital that can't fully do its job. The coming report will show whether the system catches problems like this — or only reacts once they're public.