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The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
The Hospital Authority (HA) will immediately introduce additional measures in public hospitals to lessen the impact to patients and relieve work pressures of frontline healthcare staff in view of the recent persistent high demand of public hospital services, on top of the enhanced measures which had been implemented earlier.
"Public hospitals are facing a critical challenge in meeting the service demand arising from the peak of winter influenza season. Over the past month, more than 10 days in our Accident & Emergency (A&E) Departments have recorded the daily attendance of 7,000 comparing with a normal day of about 6,000. Regarding the daily admission via A&E Department to medical wards, the norm is around 800 patients. However, in the past 28 days, the daily admissions have been persistently over 900 cases. Among those days, there were 18 days having a recorded high of over 1,000 patients. It is a rare situation, " said the HA Director of Cluster Services, Dr Cheung Wai-lun, today (March 9).
Dr Cheung attributed the situation to three main factors: People especially the elderly easily felt sick due to cold weather; the influenza is on the rising trend over the past 10 days in which the chronically ill were more prone to infection; and the overall ageing of patients.
In addition to the enhanced contingency measures which have already been implemented in the past two months, HA will launch the following additional contingency measures to increase the bed capacity and deployment and also to augment the service capacity in A&E Departments. These extra measures include:
* Reducing elective admission and deferring non-emergent elective operations to vacate more beds to take care of in-patients admitted from A&E;
* Introducing Drug Refill Programme at specialist clinics and general out-patient clinics. Instead of being seen by doctor, those clinically stable out-patients will be assessed by nursing staff who will arrange the refill of medications. Since the majority of the specialist clinic patients are being followed up under medical specialty, the Programme will allow medical specialists to deploy more time on in-patient care. Moreover, the introduction of this Programme in general out-patient clinics would release the doctors to see more episodic cases when quotas are released, so as to release the pressure on A&E;
* Enhancing Community Health Call Centre. A team of nursing staff will pro-actively follow up the discharged patients for better self-management;
* Extending the A&E Support Session Programme. HA will encourage more clinical staff to join the Programme. Instead of confining the Programme to a four-hour session, flexibility will be allowed for clinicians to flexibly join the Programme to serve in a session from one-hour up to four-hour. This measure is expected to increase manpower to take care of patients being triaged under Category 4 and 5; and
* Increasing service capacity in convalescent hospital. This is to facilitate the transfer of stable patients from acute to convalescent hospitals within cluster, or cross-cluster if necessary.
Dr Cheung said as the weather is forecast to turn cold in the coming days, members of the public are appealed to accommodate the overcrowded situation of public hospitals and try to make appropriate use of public healthcare services. For non-urgent illnesses, the public is advised to consider visiting general out-patient clinic or primary care services.
Dr Cheung would also like to take the opportunity to express his heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to the healthcare staff of public hospitals for their dedicated service under the present pressing situation. He also appealed to the understanding and cooperation of the public to support the frontline staff in public hospitals while waiting for treatment.
Ends/Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Issued at HKT 20:32
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