Dear Hospital Authority,

We are students from Hong Kong Baptist university who are writing to ask some questions about the booking system . We found seeing specialist doctors is more and more difficult in Hong Kong nowadays, long waiting time is a big problem to Hong Kong citizens.

Q.1. According to data.gov.hk, the New Case Booking for Specialist Outpatient Services are categorized into urgent, semi-urgent and stable (. In what ways does the Authority determine whether a case is urgent, semi-urgent or stable? If the conditions of a patient changes, how can s/he inform the Authority and ask for an earlier appointment?

Q.2 We noticed considerable variation in the waiting time for the same specialty across different regions. For example the waiting time for Psychiatry in HK East is 35 weeks and the waiting time for Kowloon East is 93 weeks (for stable cases). To what extent is it feasible for the Authority to transfer patients between regions and re-assign doctors from one hospital to another in order to reduce the differences in waiting time across regions?

Q 3 To what extent is it feasible for the Authority to hire private doctors as part-timers to reduce the waiting time for some regions and specialties with the longest waiting time?

Please also notice our expectations on HA:

While we appreciate your efforts to the public under the Code on Access to Information, we still find some questions like we mentioned before. We would appreciate it if HA can maintain a professional standard when fulfilling our requests. We hope you could answer our questions separately instead of an answer without a clear indication. If no information is available to our questions, please let us know, so that we can follow up properly. We will definitely review our questions to more senior departments. If it is believed to be solved properly, please feel free to contact us. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,

齊劭杰