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The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
The Hospital Authority Board discussed and endorsed at its open meeting today (September 20) the recommendations to provide a refund mechanism to the obstetric package charges paid by Non-Eligible Persons (NEP) fulfilling certain criteria.
The authority's Chief Executive, Mr Shane Solomon, said the primary objective of the no-refund policy was to provide a disincentive for non-local mothers to use the public obstetric services to ensure that local mothers were given priority to use obstetric services in public hospitals.
"The policy also aims to minimise the abuse of the obstetric booking system by non-local pregnant women through making multiple bookings at private and public hospitals, and hence, unnecessary waste on resources," Mr Solomon said.
At the board meeting today, authority members noted that in the half-year review following the implementation of various measures to address the increase in demand for obstetric services, there had been a significant drop in the number of deliveries by non-local women in public hospitals.
"While ensuring adequate capacity and priority for local mothers in using public hospital services, the Hospital Authority could now respond to requests from non-local mothers asking for exceptional consideration of refund based on special circumstances."
"These special circumstances can be grouped into two categories - the occurrence of miscarriage, termination of pregnancy and still birth in non-authority hospitals, and on a change from NEP to Eligible Persons (EP) status during the period between payment of the package fee and delivery."
Partial refund of $20,000 will be made for justified cases fulfilling the criteria in the first category which reflected the average cost of child birth which is not utilised. The Hospital Authority will retain $19,000 in order to maintain the built-in disincentive, and for the setup, logistic and cost of additional infrastructure, manpower, for capacity reservation and administration of the booking arrangement.
Pregnant women with a change of status from NEP to EP will be fully refunded for the obstetric package charges, after deducting the charges for non-locals in whatever public hospital services they received before their change of status.
"The refund under these circumstances will not be an entitlement but subject to an application and approval process, while retrospective refund to cover the period from February 1 onwards will be available for non-locals under the defined situations. With the endorsement of the recommendations by the Board today, the refund policy will be gazetted for public information and implementation in late October," Mr Solomon said.
Ends/Thursday, September 20, 2007
Issued at HKT 20:00
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