Hong Kong should divert more dental patients to private clinics to ease public service demand: lawmaker, concern group
- Joint call for public-private partnership to ease dental service shortage follows city’s auditor push for shake-up of appointment system at government clinics
- ‘We have always hoped that apart from relying on the few remaining public clinics, the government will use public-private partnerships,’ concern group says
Hong Kong should divert more dental patients to private clinics to alleviate demand for public services, a lawmaker and concern group have said after the city’s auditor revealed some people were forced to wait overnight to get appointments.
The joint call for a public-private partnership to ease the shortage of dental services was issued on Thursday, a day after the Audit Commission said the number of appointments at 11 public dental clinics had fallen from 40,322 in the 2018-19 financial year to 20,337 in 2022-23, a drop of about 50 per cent.
In December 2023 and February of this year, the auditor observed patients queuing at some public clinics about seven hours early so they could register for an appointment once the quota for available days started at 12am.
Society for Community Organisation (SoCO) community organiser Ivan Lin Wai-kiu on Thursday said: “Even for the government, it is hard for them to find dentists and the job vacancy rate has always been very high. This makes it very hard for us to ask them to increase quotas.”
He said public clinics were low-income residents’ only option as treatment was expensive elsewhere, despite such facilities only offering emergency dental services such as tooth extractions and pain-relief measures.
“For some low-income families, besides the public dental clinics, they have no other solutions,” Lin told a radio programme. “Most of the time, they will only go to these clinics when they are in too much pain or feeling at their worst.”