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Bed crunch at other public hospitals eased, and another 350 beds will be added soon
When the new Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (KTPH) opened its emergency department on June 28, its CEO expected just 30 patients to walk through.
Instead, more than 100 came, and the numbers are going up by 15 per cent every week.
For most of last week, all its 200 beds were fully occupied, said Mr Liak Teng Kit, describing how the bed demand “was close to the worst-case scenario”.
But the team at the new hospital in Yishun was prepared for the load which, more importantly, has helped to ease the squeeze at other public hospitals.
The bed crunch has been so bad in the past couple of years that non-urgent surgery had to be put off, beds placed along corridors and hours spent waiting for an available bed.
Touring the premises yesterday with his Brunei counterpart and health officials from the region, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said the workload at KTPH has already exceeded that of Alexandra Hospital, from which it drew its doctors and nurses.
KTPH sees about 200 patients in the emergency department and almost 800 at its specialist clinics each day.
The lighter burden on other hospitals is showing, he said.
In the past two to three weeks, not a single public hospital patient has had to wait more than 10 hours for a bed. He added: “I’m hopeful that after next week, the situation will improve further.”
By then, another 350 beds will have been added.
Mr Liak expects the new beds to also fill up quickly. So far, only critical ambulance cases are taken to the hospital – or about five or six patients a day.
By the end of next week, Singapore Civil Defence Force ambulances will ferry all nearby cases to the hospital.
Mr Liak expects between 65 and 80 ambulance cases a day, of which 80 per cent will need to be warded.
Mr Khaw said that Singapore will not be caught out by a shortage of hospital beds again.
The building of Jurong General Hospital will start this year. The hospital, slated to have about 700 beds, should open before 2015.
Although Alexandra Hospital will then be closed and its 300 beds taken out of the system, there will still be a net increase of about 400 beds.
A site in the Sengkang-Punggol area, which has a growing population, has been reserved for yet another new hospital.
Mr Khaw expects each new hospital to bring “real value-add” to the table.
KTPH, for example, is able to arrange same-day clinics for older patients who need to see several specialists
in a month, saving them several trips to the hospital.
The visiting health officials were impressed by the way a computer tracks a patient’s movement from the point of admission, and how nurses can pull up patients’ medical histories online.
Said the Philippines’ Under-Secretary for Health, Dr Mario Villaverder: “It increases efficiency and lowers cost. In the Philippines, we still use paper files.”
Singapore has just played host to health ministers and senior officials from the Asean countries and
China, Japan and South Korea at the group’s biennial meeting.
Reporters asked Mr Khaw, who nderwent a heart bypass less than hree months ago, how ready he nd his People’s Action Party team n Sembawang GRC are for the ext general election.
He replied: “Ever ready. Like all constituencies, we’ve been preparing for months...I’ll be able to do block visits from September onwards. should be able to outrun you.”
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