Specialist Outpatient Clinics waiting time

10 July 2012

Question No. 449

Name of person: Mr David Ong

To ask the Minister for Health (a) what are the factors that have contributed to the current long waiting times of up to six months for some new cases for an appointment at the Specialist Outpatient Clinics of the restructured hospitals; and (b) what are the strategic approaches to minimize long waiting times so that it will not be the norm in the public hospitals

Answer 

1        Specialist Outpatient Clinic (SOC) waiting times for new appointments vary across hospitals and across specialties within each hospital.  Fast-tracked referral arrangements between polyclinics and SOCs have enabled our hospitals to keep median waiting times for subsidised patients with urgent cardiac and suspected cancer conditions at eight and six days respectively. For the emergency cases, they will be attended to immediately at the A&E departments.

2        For less urgent referrals, the overall median waiting time for first appointment was 24 days in 2011.  For these referrals, some specialties such as orthopaedic surgery, gastroenterology and renal medicine, have longer median waiting times of between one and two months.  A small minority – about 0.1% - of subsidised patients waited six months or longer for new SOC appointments in 2011.  While such long waiting times are not the norm in public hospitals, it is natural for these patients to be anxious as they would like to be examined by the specialists as soon as possible.  We have thus been working actively with the hospitals to reduce waiting times at the SOCs.

3        Hospitals employ a multi-pronged approach to reduce waiting times.  First, hospitals are taking steps to improve the efficiency of the appointment system by reminding patients of their appointments via phone calls and text messages and also enabling patients to make changes of appointments more easily through dedicated central SOC appointment call centres.  In this way, they can help reduce “no-show” rates, where appointments are made but patients fail to show up.  Second, hospitals are also working closely with Polyclinics and GPs to continue the care of patients who no longer require specialist care at the SOC, and to minimize unnecessary referrals to SOC in the first place if the patients can be adequately cared for at the Polyclinics and private GP clinics.  This way, we can reduce the unnecessary patient load at the SOC and free up more capacity for those who really need specialist care.  Third, as announced during the COS debate earlier this year, we are setting up more Medical Centres (MCs) in the community.  In addition to Jurong Medical Centre which opened since 2006, more will be set up over the next few years.  MCs are designed to provide broad-based specialist care in a community setting.  Patients who need specialist care in selected specialties will be able to see specialists in an MC nearer their homes. With the support of specialists in these MCs, GPs can co-manage patients with more complex but stable conditions in the community as part of shared care programmes.  The MCs will also have diagnostic and support services to serve the patients and support the GPs.  The setting up of MCs will help to further ease the load at the SOC in our acute hospitals.