Secretary for Labour & Welfare Chris Sun today announced the official launch of a guide for mandated reporters' reference on child protection.

The Mandatory Reporting of Child Abuse Ordinance, which mandates 25 categories of specified professionals from the social welfare, education and healthcare sectors to report serious child abuse cases, will commence on January 20, 2026, to create a wide and effective protection web for children.

As such, the Government formed three professional consultative panels in each of these sectors in early 2024 for formulating the guide.

Addressing the guide's launch ceremony, Mr Sun said that the three professional consultative panels comprise cross-disciplinary professionals.

He noted that their professional exchanges on different cases not only have assisted in establishing a list of key factors that mandated reporters should take into consideration before deciding whether a report is necessary under different scenarios, but also laid an important foundation for the decision trees in the guide, which further helps mandated reporters make reporting decisions and serves as a practical reference for them.

The welfare chief said that an electronic system of the decision trees has also been specially developed by the Social Welfare Department to assist mandated reporters in making an analysis of the case scenarios in a swift and convenient manner only by answering simple questions.

He added that the electronic system will also direct those cases that need mandatory reporting to the reporting page to ensure mandated reporters can make a report as soon as practicable.

The features of the guide were introduced at the ceremony. A demonstration of the workflow of the electronic version of the decision trees to be rolled out was also featured.

While formulating the guide, the professional consultative panels discussed 650 case scenarios and questions collected from their sectors in 33 focus group meetings.

The valuable advice gathered from the 540 frontline professionals participating in these focus group meetings became a helpful and important reference for the professional consultative panels to finalise the details of the guide.

The Government will roll out Module 2 of the online learning course for specified professionals in phases starting from next week, covering basic knowledge on the legal and reporting matters related to the ordinance, including the key content of the ordinance, a brief introduction to the guide, analysis of common scenarios, reporting procedures and post-reporting follow-up.