ENG-2006 — Page 206

170 Health

comprehensive range of clinical specialties, including Internal Medicine, Surgery, Neurosurgery, Clinical Oncology, Cardiology, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ophthalmology, Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Otorhinolaryngology, Paediatrics, Pathology, Psychiatry, Radiology, Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care and others.

In 2006, there were 1.1 million in-patient and day patient discharges in public. hospitals. As mentioned above, in line with international trend, the Hospital Authority has started to shift the delivery of healthcare away from hospitals to settings that are nearer to the patient's home. This represents a paradigm shift in the provision of health service from a disease model to a holistic health model, and from focusing on episodic acute hospital care to adopting a life-course approach with an emphasis on preventive, curative and rehabilitative health care. As a result, despite rapid increase in service demand due to the ageing population, the number of patient days, bed occupancy rates and average length of stay in public hospitals remained relatively constant over the past few years.

Accident and Emergency Services

There are 15 public hospitals under the Hospital Authority providing Accident and Emergency Services. Their missions are to provide a high standard of emergency care to those in need of acute treatment, to offer emergency life support to the critically ill, and to manage disasters that bring in massive casualties. In the financial year 2005-06, about $1.5 billion were allocated for the provision of such services.

In 2006, the Accident and Emergency Departments of public hospitals had about 2 million attendances by 1.2 million patients, or 5 558 attendances per day. Since April 1999, patients attending the Accident and Emergency Departments are classified into five different categories according to their medical conditions, namely, Critical (Category 1), Emergency (Category 2), Urgent (Category 3), Semi-urgent (Category 4), and Non-urgent (Category 5). The triage system has proven to be an effective means to ensure that patients with more urgent conditions are promptly attended to. In 2006, over 95 per cent categories 1 and 2 patients were seen within the pledged waiting time.

Medical Charges and Waiver

Medical charges of hospital services in Hong Kong are affordable to the public, with government subsidy for public sector services representing a high level of 97 per cent of costs for in-patient services and 91 per cent of costs for ambulatory services. Recipients of Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) are exempted from payment of public medical charges. In addition, an enhanced medical fee waiver mechanism has been implemented to protect vulnerable groups other than CSSA recipients, including low-income patients, chronically ill patients and elderly patients with economic difficulties, against financial hardship arising from healthcare needs.

Private Hospitals

The statistics gathered in 2005 showed that the 12 private hospitals served about 17.1 per cent of the total hospital in-patients in Hong Kong. The specialty beds in these hospitals provide mostly medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology, and surgery services.