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Following is a question by Dr Hon Leung Ka-lau and a written reply by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr Ko Wing-man, in the Legislative Council today (January 9):
Question:
Will the Government inform this Council of the number of patients receiving the following services provided by the Hospital Authority (HA) and the Department of Health (DH) during the period from 1997-1998 to 2010-2011, broken down in the format in Annex 1 by the patients' district of residence (in terms of District Council district) and the hospital cluster where such services are provided:
(a) specialist out-patient service provided by HA;
(b) general out-patient service and primary care provided by HA;
(c) non-general out-patient service provided by DH;
(d) general out-patient service and primary care provided by DH; and
(e) accident and emergency service provided by HA?
Reply:
President,
(a), (b) and (e) The Hospital Authority (HA) provides different kinds of public healthcare services throughout the territory to enable patients to have convenient access to these services according to their needs. HA encourages patients to seek medical treatment from the hospital clusters/regional hospitals in the districts of their residence so as to facilitate the follow-up of any of their chronic conditions and the provision of community support. Nevertheless, individual patients may have other considerations when they choose a medical facility for medical treatment. For instance, they may choose to receive medical treatment at a specialist or general out-patient clinic in a certain district for the convenience of travelling to and from their work place. And under emergency circumstances, they may also be transferred to an acute hospital in the proximity to the pick-up location having regard to the ambulance route, etc.
In respect of parts (a), (b) and (e) of the question, statistical figures pertaining to the specialist out-patient, general out-patient and accident and emergency services provided by HA, broken down by hospital cluster and year, are set out in Annexes 2 to 4 respectively.
Since HA manages its resources allocation and service arrangements on the basis of hospital clusters, the analysis of statistical figures on cross-district services are based on hospital clusters instead of District Council districts. Besides, as HA adopted a computer programme in phases after the SARS incident to assist frontline staff to systematically input the residential address reported by patients and convert them into district codes for analysis, and the computer system of HA mainly records the number of attendances (instead of the number of patients), an analysis of patients' reported residential addresses can only be provided starting from 2006/07 in terms of the numbers of attendances.
(c) and (d) As for the services of the Department of Health (DH), members of the public in general are not required to use the service of DH according to the district of their residence. They may choose to receive services from any clinic/centre taking into account such factors as district of residence, place of work or personal preferences, etc. As the computer systems of the respective services mainly record the number of attendances and are unable to compile statistical figures based on the residential addresses of the service users, we can only provide a breakdown of the number of attendances in the clinics/centres by District Council districts.
The public general out-patient clinics under DH have been transferred to HA since July 2003. We have already provided in Annex 3 statistical figures pertaining to the general out-patient service provided by HA. As for statistical figures pertaining to the specialist out-patient service and primary care and health services provided by DH during the same period, they are set out in Annex 5 and 6 respectively.
Ends/Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Issued at HKT 15:35
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