Rise in emergency fees at Hong Kong public hospitals fails to cut queues and waiting times

The rise in emergency charges at Hong Kong’s public hospitals has failed to cut queues and waiting times for urgent cases, despite a drop in the total number of patients, according to new figures.

But the Hospital Authority said it had no plans to further increase the charge, which grew from HK$100 to HK$180 in June last year. The rise was intended to curb the number of non-urgent patients waiting in emergency rooms.

The authority’s latest figures, released on Friday, showed about 2,079,000 people visited A&E departments between July 2017 and June 2018, down 4.4 per cent year on year. Of them, 61 per cent – or 1,261,000 – were non-urgent cases, a drop from 63 per cent the previous year. About 5,000 cases were uncategorised.

Dr Vivien Chuang Wai-man, the authority’s chief manager of infection, emergency and contingency, said: “We can see that the new A&E charge helps deter some of the non-urgent patients using emergency services and we can allocate more resources and manpower to urgent patients who need emergency services.”

But she said the number of urgent cases rose by 11,000 to 813,000 in the past year, and the average waiting time had lengthened from 24 minutes in 2015 to 26 minutes in 2018, because more elderly people used emergency ward services.

She said the situation worsened particularly after the authority started waiving fees for old-age living allowance recipients over 75, in July last year.