Waiting Time for New Case Booking at
Ear, Nose, Throat 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 July 2025 - 30 June 2026), there were 102,323 new case bookings in Ear, Nose, Throat 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	13,549	13%	Median	Less than 1 week	Less than 1 week	Less than 1 week	Less than 1 week	1 week	Less than 1 week	Less than 1 week
Semi-urgent Case	14,654	14%	Median	6 weeks	7 weeks	4 weeks	5 weeks	4 weeks	5 weeks	5 weeks
Stable Case	74,110	72%	Median	24 weeks	24 weeks	40 weeks	54 weeks	36 weeks	34 weeks	39 weeks
			Longest(1)	54 weeks	53 weeks	62 weeks	84 weeks	84 weeks	79 weeks	54 weeks

(For reference only)
Date of Next Update: 30 October 2026

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) The information on this page is based on the old clustering arrangement. The Hong Kong East Cluster and the Hong Kong West Cluster have officially been integrated to establish the Hong Kong Island Cluster from 1 April 2026. The information will be updated in due course.