Transcript of remarks by S for Health at media session
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Reporter: Professor Lo, on COVID-19, what is the Government's strategy in boosting vaccination? Is it still relying on the Vaccine Pass? On the Primary Healthcare Blueprint, how would the Government incentify the public to take part? For the Chronic Disease Co-Care Pilot Scheme, will full subsidy be considered?
Secretary for Health: The Government adopts various strategies to promote vaccination. Vaccine Pass is only one of the strategies. We have been making a lot of publicity in time to publicise, encourage and promote vaccination. Also, we are sending medical teams to the community to try to promote vaccination and to offer vaccination to, especially high-risk group, the elderly population. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation in the media and community about the adverse effect of vaccines, a lot of anti-science and anti-vaccine propaganda, which unfortunately is creating a hesitancy among our elderly in getting this vaccine. We hope we can work together to remove all these misinformation and hurdles, and try to encourage our high-risk population especially our young kids and the elderly to boost up the vaccination rate as soon as possible because this will be a serious burden for our healthcare services if these high-risk groups get infected. This is actually a very high risk for the health of these elderly and young kids.
For the Primary Healthcare Blueprint, we are putting through the Chronic Disease Co-Care Pilot Scheme in a hope that we can promote early detection and diagnosis, as well as health management for these chronic diseases. The targeted group is people who are not yet diagnosed with diabetes mellitus. We want to have an early detection of the disease before the development of the complication. At present, about half of these chronic diseases remain undetected. One third of these cases, by the time they get the condition detected and diagnosed, they have already developed a complication which put them in a very high-risk situation and substantially increases the cost of the treatment. By earlier detection, we hope that we can improve the health of these people. At the same time, we ensure that they can receive early treatment in the community rather than treatment for serious complication in the hospitals in the latter part of their lives.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Saturday, December 24, 2022
Issued at HKT 11:38
Issued at HKT 11:38
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