New system to cut wait for hospital beds
After the launch of an electronic bed management system, Gauteng patients won’t need to wait long for a hospital bed.
|||Pretoria - Patients in Gauteng will now face minimal waiting times to secure a hospital bed, after the provincial health MEC Qedani Mahlangu launched a groundbreaking electronic Bed Management System (eBMS) in Pretoria on Tuesday.
“Patients used to wait for 36 hours, that is three days, for a (hospital) bed. During that time, the patient would be lying on a stretcher, being given drips and being done this and that because there is no bed available to treat the patient in that hospital,” Mahlangu said at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria.
“Now we no longer wait for 36 hours. It takes 24 hours at least, within a day, a patient can get a bed. The bed may not even be in the hospital where you are. We can find the bed in another (and transfer the patient to another) hospital because the system is linked in the (Steve Biko Academic Hospital) cluster of medical facilities.”
According to the Gauteng health department, the province’s hospitals managed an average of 27.7 million patients annually, and often experienced a huge shortage of beds. Mahlangu said the eBMS innovation, directly accessed by hospital staff and emergency medical personnel, now ensures that all hospitals within a cluster can share the burden accordingly.
“Now, on a screen you can see that at this hospital, out of 120 beds, so many are available. You can also see if those beds are paediatric, for adults or for male or female. We now have that information (for all the hospitals in the same cluster) and that is going to help a great deal,” said Mahlangu.
“Whatever we do, we must improve the lives of doctors, nurses and ambulances emergency services personnel. An emergency staffer testified that when the beds were being managed manually, by the time they pick a patient from an accident scene, by the time they go to the hospital – the bed they had been told on paper that it is available is no longer available because someone might have been dropped off by family or private ambulance. Now it’s instant on our system.”
Steve Biko Academic Hospital is supported by two tertiary hospitals – Kalafong and Tembisa in Gauteng. These three hospitals are supported by Mamelodi, Tshwane District and Tshwane West. These six hospitals are all supported by numerous clinics and other medical facilities in the cluster.
The eBMS now allows medical staff to seamlessly identify the location of available beds across the cluster, thereby improving on patient movement and management.
Mahlangu said previously, emergency staff had moved from one hospital to the other seeking a bed for critical patients. She said in the past, when clerks and nurses manually checked the availability of hospital beds, the situation would have changed by the time they finished the process of collecting information.
Using innovative cloud-based technology, the system allows hospital and emergency staff to view current bed availability within their hospital on large display screens or over the internet on their mobile devices.
Mahlangu said she anticipated that the system would be fully implemented across the province by the end of 2016.
The system was funded by a R3 million donation from the Social Advancement Foundation (SAF). Programme manager at SAF, Lebo Uriesi, said her organisation would partner again with the provincial health authorities to spread the system across Gauteng.
African News Agency
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