Speaking to reporters after a Commercial Radio programme, Lo said the Hospital Authority had around 3,200 nursing vacancies at the moment.
However, among the 4,000 nursing graduates last year, only 2,500 of them applied for HA jobs.
“It is not that the Hospital Authority does not hire them, but that graduates have a choice – nearly 40 percent of them did not apply for jobs at the HA,” he said.
“As for those who did apply and went through interview and assessments, taking registered nurses as an example, 99 percent of the 2,100 applicants were hired and only some 20 did not receive the offer due to different reasons.
“So the claim that nursing graduates are unemployed upon graduation does not hold.”
Lo added that if the nursing graduates are willing to work at the HA, they have a high chance of securing a position.
The Secretary for Health also said the turnover rate among nurses at public hospitals had declined over the past few years.
Yet, a shortage of nurses still exists in the public healthcare system.
He said nurses have various career options, including public institutions, care homes, as well as private hospitals and clinics.
Lo also said the claim that local nurses were having their jobs taken by non-locally trained staff was not true.
He said Hong Kong has more than 75,000 nurses in total.
Among the 30,000 working at Hospital Authority, only 55 were not locally trained.
He added that these non-locally trained nurses offered assistance as some positions could not recruit local staff, and they did not take anyone’s job.
On promoting primary healthcare, the health minister said that the number of district health centre members had surged by nearly 40 percent over the past year, reaching more than 600,000.
He said the city’s first five-year plan aims to further increase the number to a million.