PUBLIC ORDER
Non-government Organisations
A number of organisations assist the department in providing services to help inmates re- integrate with the community. These include the Society for the Rehabilitation of Offenders, Hong Kong; Caritas Lop Heep Club; Hong Kong Christian Kun Sun Association; Wu Oi Christian Centre and the Prisoners' Friends' Association. They provide services such as case work, counselling, hostel accommodation, employment assistance, recreational activities and care for those with a history of mental illness.
Civil Aid Services
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The Civil Aid Services (CAS) is an auxiliary emergency relief organisation. Its main role is to support government departments in tackling emergency situations. The CAS has an establishment of 126 permanent staff, and 3 634 adult volunteers and 3 232 cadets.
Role and Responsibilities
The work of the CAS has a heavy emphasis on coping with natural disasters and performing civic duties.
Its volunteers are trained to perform duties during tropical cyclones, landslips and flooding; to search for and rescue persons trapped in collapsed buildings; to fight forest fires and patrol country parks; to manage refugee camps; to combat oil pollution at sea; to carry out crowd control duties and to perform mountain rescue operations. Adult volunteers help to organise and provide crowd control, communications and marshalling services at charity fund-raising activities, government campaign events and other public functions. On any weekend or public holiday, it is normal for over 500 volunteers and cadets to be on duty.
Vietnamese Migrant Duties
The permanent staff and volunteers of the CAS continue to manage two Vietnamese refugee and migrant centres --- the New Horizons Vietnamese Refugee Departure Centre (for Vietnamese refugees who have been accepted for resettlement overseas) and the Kai Tak Vietnamese Migrant Transit Centre (for Vietnamese migrants awaiting voluntary repatriation to Vietnam, and Vietnamese women at an advanced stage of pregnancy and their accompanying relatives from other detention centres; Vietnamese migrants seeking medical advice and treatment are also lodged temporarily at the Kai Tak centre).
The work in these centres is both physically and psychologically demanding. Duties are performed under difficult conditions, and a good deal of dedication and patience is required of those involved. CAS volunteers, who have met all demands made on them, have been involved in refugee management since 1975 and continuously since 1988. This work will continue for some time in the future.
Service Training
Service training is divided into full-time centralised courses and part-time unit training. The training syllabus for the centralised courses covers a wide variety of subjects including counter-disaster skills, first-aid, fire-fighting and conventional rescue instruction. In 1994, a total of 220 full-time courses were conducted. Workshops on casualty handling and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation were also conducted to enhance volunteers' knowledge and experience in managing human crush situations.
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