Ipoh General Hospital implements Bed Management Unit

 

The Raja Permaisuri Bainun Hospital in Ipoh (HRPB, Ipoh General Hospital) has created a 24-hour Bed Management Unit (BMU) to expedite admission into all its wards.

This is being done as the hospital investigates allegations of patients stranded in its Emergency and Trauma Department (ETD), with some patients having met their untimely demise.

In a statement responding to a report by an online healthcare news portal, Code Blue, published yesterday, Dec 12, the hospital director Dr Megat Iskandar Megat Abdul Hamid said patients whose critical conditions have stabilised will be transferred.

“In order to tackle the overcrowding, we will transfer patients whose conditions have improved but still require treatment.

“The Bed Management Unit will expedite admissions into wards, patients coming from the emergency unit and also by tackling the discharge of patients,” he explained.

Admitting that there was room for improvement, Megat Iskandar explained that the emergency units in general hospitals received an unusually high number of patients brought in by ambulance, walk-ins and referrals.

Seven months of overcrowding

However, he said, the hospital will meet with the state Health Department and the Health Ministry to discuss ways to increase its capacity.

The Code Blue report described the dire scenario of overcrowding at the HRPB emergency and trauma unit over the past seven months.

With beds packing the corridor, patients were left in “no man’s zone” and severely ill patients were stranded in the emergency unit, waiting for a bed in critical care, sometimes up to two to three days.

Code Blue reported that HRPB doctors have attributed the deluge of patients to be the seriously sick non-Covid patients who had put their follow-up appointments on hold during the pandemic and were now crowding the hospital’s emergency unit.

Doctors have identified the most common critically ill patients to be suffering from heart disease and kidney failure, as well as stroke victims. - Mkini