Get accredited! Hong Kong to unveil voluntary scheme for health professionals after police crackdown on beauty salon
But critics argue loophole remains without a regulatory board
In an attempt to protect the Hong Kong public from dubious “therapists” who provide unregulated or substandard services, the government plans to introduce a new voluntary scheme to accredit 15 types of allied health professionals, such as dietitians and clinical psychologists.
But the new voluntary scheme will not close a loophole that allows any individual to claim to be a health professional, such as a “music therapist” or a “nature therapist”.
Concerns about allied health services, which are not regulated like the medical and pharmaceutical professions, are in the spotlight after a recent police crackdown on a beauty salon in Causeway Bay.
They arrested 11 women accused of claiming to be “therapists” and cheating HK$5 million out of seven cancer patients who received oxygen and magnetic “therapy”. Two of them died.
Tim Pang Hung-cheong, spokesman for the Patients’ Rights Association, said the loophole remained unplugged under the latest proposal to assign a body to regulate such therapists through a registration system.
“Instead of a voluntary scheme, the government should set up a board to supervise these professions,” Pang said. “They should be regulated under a system similar to the one for doctors and nurses.”
It is a criminal offence for anyone to claim to be a doctor, nurse or pharmacist, if their names are not on the registration list, but allied health professions are not restricted in the same way.
The new proposal, introduced briefly in the chief executive’s policy address this year, was in response to an Ombudsman report in 2013 highlighting the problem.
In return, accredited professionals can state in their titles that they are approved by the Department of Health, subject to renewal every three years.
The scheme will initially cover 15 types of professionals: speech therapists, educational psychologists, audiologists, audiology technicians, chiropodists, clinical psychologists, dental surgery assistants, dental technicians, dental therapists, dietitians, dispensers, mould laboratory technicians, orthoptists, prosthetists and scientific officers.
The department had commissioned Chinese University’s public health and primary care school in 2014 to conduct a study on the feasibility of adopting the scheme. The university will conduct a pilot scheme by the end of this year.
