ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the government defined its role and boundary of intervention in health care and how it utilised the different major societal resources in response to the changing political and socio-economic context of Hong Kong between 1945 and 1966. During the seven years between 1945 to 1952 there were different plans drawn for constitutional reform in Hong Kong. However, the only change which came out of the long-lasting and heated constitutional debates was just a modest increase in the number of elected seats on the Urban Council from 2 to 4 out of 15. During the immediate post-war period, 1945–1949, the health services development strategy was no different to that adopted prior to 1942: most of the state resources devoted to medical and health services were concentrated on the control of communicable diseases, particularly the formidable epidemics of small-pox, cholera and tuberculosis.
