Press Releases
Acting SFH and CHP Controller on human swine flu vaccine
Following is the transcript of remarks (English portion) made by the Acting
Secretary for Food and Health, Professor Gabriel Leung, and the Controller
of the Centre for Health Protection, Dr Thomas Tsang, at a stand-up media
session at the West Wing of the Central Government Offices this afternoon
(December 28):
Reporter: (Question on private doctors' charges on vaccination)
Acting Secretary for Food and Health: I think one has to put the additional
charges in perspective. If you look at the numbers, which are all quite
transparently uploaded on the Centre for Health Protection's website, you
will see that there are quite a number of doctors charging zero dollar on
top of the Government's subsidy and the median for additional charges is
$50. So, you really have at least half of the participating doctors, and
there are more than 900 of them, who would charge anywhere between zero and
$50 which I think most of the public would find it to be an affordable
amount. Of course, depending on personal preference and also whether you
would prefer to have one clinic or one doctor to vaccinate over another,
perhaps, and you really have a wide variety of choices. If you are one of
the high-risk groups, you can go to the public facilities or you can go to
more than 900 private facilities and all in all, you have more than 1,000 of
these outlets. So I think the main message is that, I would strongly
encourage especially those high-risk groups, to consider getting vaccinated
and you have a very large number of points and outlets from which you could
get vaccinated. Please do so before the second wave of pandemic has arrived.
Reporter: (Question on the mechanism to ensure that vaccination would be
given out properly)
Acting Secretary for Food and Health: Dr Tsang will answer you the questions
on the implementation and the regulation. I think the most important thing
is that, our high-risk groups in Hong Kong should strongly consider whether
they should get vaccinated. We would all recommend, following the advice of
the Scientific Committee, that people in the five high-risk categories
should get vaccinated before the second wave comes.
Controller of the Centre for Health Protection: Right now, we have a couple
of mechanisms to ensure that the vaccines are delivered properly. Give you
an example, on our e-health platform, which regulates the reimbursement to
private doctors, there is an in-built programme to make sure that every
claim is vetted, and the system can automatically detect suspicious claims
particularly a double claim by doctors. So, we will be automatically alerted
if there is something suspicious. And following that, we have some other
auditing mechanism like stringing of medical records, contacting patients to
ask where they got the vaccines and so on. So, there are mechanisms in place
to make sure that the vaccines really go to the persons in need.
(Please also refer to the
Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Monday, December 28, 2009
Issued at HKT 18:05
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