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 2024 - 31 March 2025), there were 191,047 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	13,866	7%	Median	1 week	Less than 1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week
Semi-urgent Case	30,592	16%	Median	7 weeks	4 weeks	5 weeks	6 weeks	5 weeks	5 weeks	5 weeks
Stable Case	146,097	76%	Median	39 weeks	19 weeks	38 weeks	60 weeks	53 weeks	34 weeks	38 weeks
			Longest(1)	86 weeks	74 weeks	101 weeks	99 weeks	100 weeks	90 weeks	69 weeks

(For reference only)
Date of Next Update: 31 July 2025

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