Bed shortage forces patients to wait

• Source: Global Times
• [08:08 August 05 2010]
• Comments

Several senior residents wait for treatment last month at a local hospital in the city. Photo: IC

By Zhou Ping

Emergency patients are in danger of not getting the medical attention they need right away as large hospitals face a shortage of beds due to a surge in the number of elderly patients refusing to leave their cots as extreme heat continues, again highlighting the need for more senior care facilities in the city.

Ambulance drivers are being held up at hospitals for up to two hours when admit-ting patients, according to figures reported by the Medical Emergency Center, the body in charge of dispatching ambulances across the city.

"The problem is that there aren't enough spare beds at hospitals when ambulance workers arrive, so the patient can't be immediately transferred to the emergency room," Guan Min, director of the Medical Emergency Center, told the Global Times Wednesday. "We're being forced to keep patients on the stretcher in the ambulance until hospital beds free up."

The Medical Emergency Center said that some 100 ambulances were dispatched 867 times on Monday, when temperatures reached 39 C, while ambulances were sent out 820 times on Tuesday as temperatures remained high. The figures are up nearly 12 percent from previous months.

"There were 300 cases last month when ambulances had to wait outside the hospitals because there weren't any free beds for them to move patients inside to emergency rooms," he added. "We saw the same thing happen with roughly 200 cases in June."

According to Guan, it generally takes ambulance drivers about an hour to pick a patient up and have him or her admitted to hospital.

"But over the past two months, the process averages upwards of two or three hours because ambulance staffers get delayed when they arrive at hospitals," said Guan.

He added that when possible ambulances have recently been equipped with an extra stretcher to enable patients to proceed straight to emergency.

Guan said that while none of the patients suffering from the delays over the past two months had life-threatening injuries, he worried about ambulance patients receiving timely treatment for the remainder of the summer period as the weather remains miserably hot.

Elderly staying put

According to Lu Yiming, director of emergency services at Ruijin Hospital in Luwan district, the number of cases involving seniors refusing to leave after being released by hospital staff has risen sharply in recent months.

"Many senior residents prefer to stay at the hospital after they've been given the okay to return home," he told the Global Times Wednesday. "Old people think that it's safer for them to stay where there's access to professional medical care during the day; they worry about falling faint or getting heatstroke when no one is at home to call for help for them.

"Some senior patients have even rented out their homes as a way to pay for hospital fees," he added, saying that because many of them have chronic diseases the hospital agrees to let them stay.