Privacy regulations are blocking data that could benefit health care in HK

As Hong Kong offices wound down yesterday at the end of a typically manic Monday, an important deadline passed quietly - unnoticed and unremarked upon by the vast majority of the city's population engrossed in their busy lives and the run-up to the Lunar New Year holiday.

The deadline was for submissions to the Ombudsman's investigation into the public's right and ability to access government information, a process that has potentially huge implications for the people's future right to know about a range of issues.

But, despite being announced with some fanfare last month and triggering a flurry of editorials and commentaries in the city's media, the investigation hardly appears to have set the public imagination alight.

By noon yesterday, less than 20 submissions from organisations and individuals had been received by the Ombudsman's office, a spokeswoman confirmed to the .

But while the debate over whether Hong Kong should update its 18-year-old Code on Access to Information might seem somewhat ethereal to many, for the director of the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, it is a pressing reality.

In an impasse that goes to the heart of the right-to-know debate, Dr Paul Yip Siu-fai has for six months been trying, without success, to persuade the Hospital Authority to release detailed geographical data on cases of attempted suicide.

He wants the data to enable his researchers to build up a profile of areas that are most vulnerable to self-harm and suicide, so that health care resources can then be recommended for those areas.