As the virus crisis has destroyed the incomes of many residents, it is a comfort to know low-cost medical care is available. The main local options are Mona Fong clinic and A&E at Tseung Kwan O hospital. In this horrible, lost year with an ageing immune system, we have had to try both. The hospital’s A&E, in our experience, is the preferable option.
Go to the Mona Fong clinic in central Sai Kung and you will be waylaid at the door by a masked and gowned girl who will take your temperature and push your mask into place with her own hands. Not good given her doorman-like job, handling many sick people. She directs you to Registration where they take your details and you pay $50. A number is given and you take a seat among other patients waiting outside the doctors’ offices. We sat for about an hour before seeing Dr Tse in No. 15. He diagnoses an ulcerous skin condition and directs you to wait outside the pharmacy. In a few minutes you are clutching your medicine and out, breathing more freely, on the sunny street. The Mona Fong is a dilapidated, sadly neglected place with battered walls, scuffed floors and peeling paint, but the staff are excellent.
Feeling very ill and worried about raised skin blotches and a distended abdomen, we motored to Tseung Kwan O hospital at about 7.30 on a Sunday morning. There’s a small car park outside the A&E entrance with only two other cars there. We walk following the red arrows to the clinic’s entrance, where another girl checks our temperature. Then to Registration and on to Triage. Within 15mins of walking through the A&E clinic’s front door we are called to Room 16 to see a young doctor who’s about 6ft 3ins tall. He diagnoses a shingles-like skin condition — “very common” — and prescribes an anti-viral, pain killer and gastric acid suppressant. So quick, so efficient, so cheap. It was just $180 for consultation with the doctor and three kinds of medicine.
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