Waiting Time for New Case Booking at
Surgery Specialist Out-patient Clinics

Specialist outpatient clinics have implemented a triage system to ensure patients with urgent conditions requiring early intervention are treated with priority. Referrals of new patients are usually first screened by a nurse and then by a specialist doctor of the relevant specialty for classification into Urgent, Semi-urgent and Stable categories. HA's targets are to maintain the median waiting time of Urgent and Semi-urgent cases within two weeks and eight weeks respectively.

In the past 12 months (01 April 2023 - 31 March 2024), there were 188,330 new case bookings in Surgery Specialist Out-patient Clinics, with waiting time as follows:

	New case bookings(2)		Waiting Time
	Number	Percentage		Hong Kong East	Hong Kong West	Kowloon Central	Kowloon East	Kowloon West	New Territories East	New Territories West
Urgent Case	13,815	7%	Median	1 week	Less than 1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week
Semi-urgent Case	31,282	17%	Median	7 weeks	5 weeks	5 weeks	6 weeks	5 weeks	5 weeks	5 weeks
Stable Case	142,609	76%	Median	44 weeks	17 weeks	33 weeks	59 weeks	53 weeks	30 weeks	35 weeks
			Longest(1)	85 weeks	69 weeks	111 weeks	106 weeks	97 weeks	86 weeks	91 weeks

(For reference only)
Date of Next Update: 31 July 2024

Notes:
(1) The longest (90th percentile) waiting time implies that appointments are earlier than the indicated time in 90% of the new case bookings
(2) Excluding cases pending for triage
(3) With effect from 1 October 2022, the waiting time for new case booking at Specialist Out-patient Clinics has incorporated integrated clinics