The Fire Services Department has rebuilt four 24-seater minibuses to help speed up the evacuation of care homes for the elderly and disabled.

Deputy Chief Ambulance Officer Kwok Kin-Man told a press conference that the four rebuilt buses will help speed up the time it takes to transfer residential care home residents by two to three times.

He said normal ambulances can only carry up to two bedridden patients but the new rigs can carry four.

“If we don’t use these vehicles, the ambulance used will need to have another two, three, or even four trips.”

Kwok said that's important as the quarantine and isolation facilities the patients are taken to are often relatively far away, such as the Asia World-Expo on Lantau Island.

He said since the start of the fifth wave of the pandemic until the end of last month, fire services handled more than 1,500 care home evacuations, and moved about 5,300 residents. 

At the peak period, the department was moving about 100 residents a day, Kwok said. 

Senior ambulance man Tse Chung-Kang told reporters about an operation to move residents of a Sha Tau Kok care home to Asia World Expo that lasted about nine hours. This, he said, involved officers carrying the elderly people in wheelchairs down the stairs one by one.

When asked why the modification project had only been launched about two years into the pandemic, the deputy ambulance chief said the department regularly reviews all projects, and that the Covid situation had fluctuated.

The cost of modifying each vehicle is about HK$500,000 to HK$600,000, but Kwok said the four vehicles could also be reconfigured for general transit use.

One of the four vehicles was put into service last Friday and has been dispatched at least six times since. The remaining three will enter service before the end of this year.