The emergency department at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) has faced a consistent rise in patient volume over recent years, exacerbating challenges posed by limited space and staffing.
Despite these constraints, Dr. Zulfikar Bux, Head of the Accident and Emergency Department, Monday said the hospital is managing the situation through an overcrowding plan and the efforts of its dedicated doctors and teams, who work to maintain effective coordination.
For the past four years, the department has almost doubled the patient volume, moving from about 37,000 patients in 2020 to now more than 60,000.
The challenges with such an increase are real for the doctors and teams at the hospital who must often endure sleepless nights, burn out, and increased work to manage this number of patients with just 18 beds.
“Ideally, we should be at 45-50 beds to manage the patient volumes that we have. If only those beds could speak, they will tell you of the abuse that they go through,” Bux told an end-of-year press conference at the hospital’s Resource Centre on New Street, Georgetown.
The more than 60k patients seen for 2024 represents a nine percent increase from 2023 and includes 7,300 referrals, most of which have been very critical cases.
“Sometimes when we have to examine patients on a bed, we have to examine their abdomen on a chair when we don’t have that choice,” Bux explained, adding, “Sometimes because of lack of bed spaces, it affects our timings and turn over. I do think that our average disposition time of four hours and five minutes can come down once we have more bed space to turn over these patients.”
Bux said the hospital has been striving to ensure that this challenge does not affect the effectiveness of care. As such, the teams have been improvising as much as possible, and using their overcrowding plan.
“But there are times when a patient just have to wait until a bed opens. And that’s the reality of the situation,” Buz said.
He noted that he is very concerned should these numbers continue for 2025/2026, and that increases in staff members and space will definitely have to be looked at.
Even with such challenges, though, he pointed out that the hospital’s waiting time has been better than world average.
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