ENG-2012 — Page 183

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Health

Other services aimed at assisting discharged elderly patients living in the community include the Telephone Nursing Consultation Service, the HA's community health call service, district elderly community centres and the community nursing service.

Extended care hospitals provide specialist programmes for the rehabilitation of pulmonary, orthopaedic, geriatric and cardiac patients, while short-term rehabilitation programmes are provided for discharged patients in day and outpatient clinics. Integrated palliative day care centres provide a full range of services for reducing the pain or stress of patients with incurable illnesses.

Dental Health

The DH's eight school dental clinics provided preventive dental services including annual dental check-ups and basic dental care to about 307,000 primary students (about 95 per cent of all Hong Kong primary students) in the 2011-12 school year.

Eleven government dental clinics provide emergency dental services to the general public for pain relief and tooth extraction, and seven public hospitals offer specialist oral healthcare services to inpatients and others with special oral health needs. The DH also monitors the level of fluoridation in water supplied to the public to reduce dental decay.

Mental Health

Over the last 5 years, Government resources allocated to mental health services have steadily increased, from $3.39 billion in 2007-08 to $4.42 billion in the 2011-12 financial year.

Providing care and community support to mental patients after their discharge from hospital can help reduce the risk of relapse. As at the end of 2012, an HA programme providing intensive, continuous and personalised support to persons with severe mental illness had been extended to cover 12 districts (Eastern, Wan Chai, Central and Western, Southern, Islands, Kwun Tong, Sham Shui Po, Kowloon City, Sha Tin, Kwai Tsing, Tuen Mun and Yuen Long), helping patients' rehabilitation and reintegration into the community.

To strengthen its community support for very high-risk patients and to provide rapid and prompt response to emergency referrals in the community, the HA set up crisis intervention teams in all of its seven clusters in 2011-12.

The HA's psychiatric specialist outpatient clinics have common mental disorder clinics providing assessment and consultation services for patients with common mental disorders. An Integrated Mental Health Programme (IMHP) at general outpatient clinics was extended to all seven HA clusters in 2011-12 to provide appropriate treatment to patients with mild mood disorders in a primary care setting. In 2011-12, the HA's programme for the early assessment and detection of psychosis in young persons (EASY), targeting young people aged between 15 and 25 with first episodic psychosis, was expanded to include adults. Support under EASY was also extended from the first two to the first three years of illness. The EASY programme's specialist teams offer one-stop, phase-specific and ongoing support for the target patients.

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