In collaboration with the Fire Services Department, the scheme involves sending patients, suspected of suffering from a major stroke caused by a blocked main artery, directly to designated hospitals for treatment, aiming to decrease brain damage risks and chronic disability.
This is on top of the authority’s territory-wide pre-hospital stroke notification mechanism that was in place from 2021, with ambulance staff performing assessments before patients arrive at the hospital and informing the accident and emergency departments to make advance arrangements.
Under the new scheme, patients within the New Territories East cluster would be sent to Prince of Wales Hospital, while those in the New Territories West cluster would be sent to Tuen Mun Hospital for clot busting.
Up until this month, around 50 stroke patients were diverted to designated hospitals under the new scheme.
About half of them received clot removal surgery.
These patients had their waiting times from calling an ambulance to treatment reduced by an average of 80 minutes, saving time from hospital transfers and repeated assessments.
“Every minute counts in acute ischemic stroke. For every minute, patients may run the risk of damaging or losing more than 1.9 million brain cells, so [the 80 minutes] is very significant,” said the authority’s director Wong Yiu-chung, who works on cluster services.
“What we have so far witnessed is that this period of time can benefit the involved patient because those who are affected with major vessel occlusion can have timely surgery and treatment being delivered to the patient,” he added.
The authority said it would gradually expand the scheme to hospital clusters in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island this year.
It added it would continue reviewing data related to the scheme to ensure smooth implementation.
Stroke is the fourth most common cause of death in Hong Kong, with the authority having received around 19,000 patients in 2025 and about 85 percent of them suffering from ischemic stroke.
Edited by Tony Sabine
