With a view to further facilitating members of the public receiving walk-in emergency dental services, the Department of Health (DH) today (September 3) said that a "Preliminary registration" arrangement would be in place starting from next Monday (September 5) at its six dental clinics providing such services located in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (except those at outlying islands) to avoid patients queueing overnight as far as practicable.
From September 5, four relevant dental clinics (Kennedy Town Community Complex Dental Clinic, Tsuen Wan Dental Clinic, Yan Oi Dental Clinic and Yuen Long Government Offices Dental Clinic) would preliminarily register personal information for the patients and verify the original of their identity document starting at 0.00am on the day of providing general public dental services. Each person can only register once. Staff would cease the preliminary registration when the number of registered persons reached the quota of the general public sessions. Those who have finished preliminary registration do not have to continue waiting. They can leave the clinic immediately and return to the relevant clinic at the original disc-distributing time in the morning on the same day to obtain a disc and register formally. Kwun Tong Dental Clinic and Kowloon City Dental Clinic will arrange "Preliminary registration" from September 14 and 15 respectively. The DH has recruited additional staff to maintain order.
Notices detailing the new arrangement and logistics have been displayed at conspicuous locations of the clinics. The addresses and time of operation of the relevant dental clinics can be viewed at website www.dh.gov.hk/english/tele/tele_chc/tele_chc_dcgps.html.
The DH has earlier rolled out trial run of the aforementioned preliminary registration arrangement at three dental clinics (namely Kennedy Town Community Complex Dental Clinic, Tsuen Wan Dental Clinic and Yuen Long Government Offices Dental Clinic) with satisfactory result.
The DH will continue its active review on how to further improve the operation of general public dental services and will extend the preliminary registration arrangement to the three remaining dental clinics in the urban area in accordance with the manpower and actual operational situation.
The dental clinics under the DH are mainly responsible for providing dental benefits for civil servants/pensioners and their eligible dependents as required of the Government as terms of employment for civil servants, and therefore civil servants/pensioners and their eligible dependents are the major service targets of these clinics. Currently, dental care services in Hong Kong are mainly provided by the private sector and non-governmental organisations. The DH provides general public sessions to offer free emergency dental treatments (including General Public Sessions to provide treatment of acute dental diseases, prescription for pain relief, treatment of oral abscess and teeth extraction) to the public through designated sessions in 11 government dental clinics of the DH.
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