Waiting Time for New Case Booking at
Psychiatry 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 (1 January 2020 - 30 December 2020), there were 44,541 new case bookings, with triage category and 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	3,179	7%	Median	1 week	1 week	1 week	1 week	Less than 1 week	1 week	1 week
Semi-urgent Case	9,940	22%	Median	3 weeks	4 weeks	4 weeks	3 weeks	4 weeks	4 weeks	3 weeks
Stable Case	31,095	70%	Median	15 weeks	18 weeks	14 weeks	46 weeks	16 weeks	57 weeks	29 weeks
			Longest(1)	33 weeks	72 weeks	38 weeks	99 weeks	78 weeks	100 weeks	64 weeks

(For reference only)
Date of Next Update: 30 April 2021

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