OBJECTIVES: Patients with disabilities suffer from worsen mobility and limit their healthcare accessibility. As a transport assistance, Non-emergency Medical Transport (NEMT) is designed for disability transfer while dominantly organised by public and non-government organisations. Yet, the NEMT’s demand could hardly be met by current public service capacity in Hong Kong. Many struggled to search for alternatives in private market while they confront conflicting objectives such as money and time trade-off in their decision making process. This study aims to list the concerned NEMT service objectives from the patients’ viewpoint in Hong Kong and facilitate patients’ decision process on NEMT.

METHODS: A mixed methodology consisting of focus group, user survey and Delphi-discussion with Multi-criteria Decisional Analysis (MCDA) will be adopted. Focus group discussion aims to elicit and structure service objectives from the perspective of NEMT user. To weight the importance of objectives, patient-experience survey will be conducted. Scoring and Delphi-process involving important stakeholders will be carried out to provide advice on the MCDA.

RESULTS: The focus group is now in progress and preliminary themes of NEMT objectives are identified by the content analysis: Staff Support, Pricing, Timeliness and Information Accessibility. The survey tool will be developed based on the focus group findings and proceed to user survey in September 2019. The findings will be discussed through Delphi-discussion regarding to three criteria: quality of care, feasibility and sustainability. The result of the MCDA will help patients with disability to choose appropriate NEMT service.

CONCLUSIONS: To ensure patients with disability may enjoy equal healthcare access, NEMT should be enhanced. The MCDA results will facilitate NEMT users to choose the suitable service. In turn, this may help service providers to improve NEMT service design so as to enhance the accessibility to healthcare and quality of life of patients with disability.