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Ombudsman concluded her direct investigation on licensed swimming pools
At a press conference on 7 March 2024, the Ombudsman, Ms Winnie Chiu, announced at a press conference the completion of a direct investigation into the regulation of licensed swimming pools by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (“FEHD”) and made 12 recommendations for improvement.
Swimming pools in Hong Kong can largely be categorised into public swimming pools operated and managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (“LCSD”) and private swimming pools licensed and regulated by FEHD pursuant to the Swimming Pools Regulation subsidiary to the Public Health and Municipal Services Ordinance. At present, there are around 1,400 licensed swimming pools across the territory. As the licensing authority, FEHD ensures licensees’ compliance with the Regulation and licensing conditions mainly through regular inspections and complaint handling to protect swimmers’ safety and maintain environmental hygiene.
The investigation by the Office of The Ombudsman revealed that swimming pools might be closed during FEHD’s surprise inspections. In one case, FEHD managed to conduct only one successful inspection during the entire swimming season.
Currently, no guidelines on how FEHD staff should handle such situations are in place. Hence, it is difficult to ensure that the frequency of successful inspections would be on target. The Office had found from a site inspection that undesirably, FEHD failed to identify irregularities (such as the abnormal test result of pH value of pool water) of the licensed swimming pool concerned from its inspection. In addition, there are different checking methods for some inspection items, which vary in rigorousness, and health inspectors may not always adopt the most reliable method during inspections. Meanwhile, owing to omission of important items in the previous inspection record form, the FEHD’s inspections were unable to ensure full compliance of swimming pools. Certain items on the inspection record form were too generic and lacked specification, making it difficult to apprehend the actual circumstances of inspections through the form. Improprieties involving compilation of inspection records were also noticed; for example, the condition of an inspection item was recorded as satisfactory even though it had not been duly checked by the health inspectors, and the verbal warning given during an inspection was not logged by the health inspector.
To read the full article, kindly click here.
To read the investigation summary including the recommendations of the Ombudsman, kindly refer to the download section below.
Source: The Ombudsman of Hong Kong, China
