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Transcript of remarks by SLW on elderly care facilities planning
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     Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Dr Law Chi-kwong, on elderly care facilities planning after attending a radio programme this morning (November 4):

Reporter: … Strengthening the design of elderly care homes …

Secretary for Labour and Welfare: In the first place, we all know that elderly persons do not prefer to live in elderly homes, except very few, and yet the demand is quite huge. Therefore there is a need to speed up and increase our supply of residential (care) homes for the elderly.

     There are two major constraints I will see, firstly is the ability to locate sites for such development which is very much related to the Hong Kong Planning Standards and Guidelines, in which we don't have any detailed specifications for the building of residential (care) homes (for the elderly). So, we have already started the process to discuss with the Planning Department and see how we can put that back into the Hong Kong Planning Standards and Guideline, so that in the future planning process in Hong Kong we will have more potential sites for such facilities.

     The other constraint is very much related to the height constraint. At present, basically all these residential (care) homes (for the elderly) have to be built beneath 24 metres, primarily because of security, safety and fire concerns. But definitely there is something we can work on. As you probably know that hospitals can be multi-storey, which basically means that building standard of residential care homes has to be upgraded to that of the hospitals, which requires design, specifications and cost considerations. We will have to handle this difficulty so that we can have more potential sites, including those over and above 24 metres in the future.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
 
Ends/Saturday, November 4, 2017
Issued at HKT 11:36
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