Tuanku Ja’afar Hospital is experiencing an absolute emergency!
So many patients have been left stranded in the emergency and trauma department (ETD) for over 12 agonising hours, just waiting and waiting to be admitted to the general ward. It’s absolutely unacceptable!
And guess what? This morning, there were a whopping 14 patients stuck in ETD, desperately waiting to either be admitted or step-down to another hospital. On another day, there were 24 patients! What a disaster!
But wait, it gets worse! The only way we can admit these patients is by discharging others from the ward.
Can you imagine the chaos and risk that this poses to patient care?
Most of the time, we have to rush discharges, putting patients at risk of receiving substandard care. The bed occupancy rate (BOR) today is a staggering 95 per cent, which should tell you just how overwhelming and dire the situation is.
Oh, and let’s not forget the little secret Tuanku Ja’afar Hospital has been keeping from the public. Brace yourself for this “mega project”.
Sure, it’ll upgrade and install a fire system in the old building, which is good, I suppose. But here’s the kicker – once the project is done, the number of beds from over 750 in the main block will be slashed to a mere 500ish.
That’s a whopping 200-bed reduction! Can they really be serious?
And we are now at the 5th floor of renovation with a 100-bed reduction.
You’d think the top-level management would be all hands on deck, trying to resolve this disaster.
But no! It seems like they couldn’t care less.
All they do is push us to step-down patients, cut back on elective operations (which already has a wait time of over six months), and rush discharges.
It’s just a big mess, but I don’t see any significant effort from them to actually address the problem.
It’s beyond frustrating!
Dr Otto (pseudonym) is a medical officer at Tuanku Ja’afar Seremban Hospital in Negeri Sembilan. CodeBlue is providing the author anonymity because civil servants are prohibited from writing to the press.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
