PESHAWAR: The new policy of ‘bed management’ has led to increase bed occupancy at Khyber Teaching Hospital from 68 per cent to 77 per cent during the previous year.

The global standard for hospitalisation at public sector hospitals is 80 per cent.

The 1300-bed KTH has been grappling with shortage of beds for the past few years, especially critically-ill or wounded patients have been at the receiving end.

They were laid on wooden benches when all beds in the concerned emergency ward were occupied.

New rules help to increase bed occupancy at KTH from 68pc to 77pc

Every ward has 40 beds, which are supposed admit cold and as well as seriously-sick patients. Many wards used to run out of beds on emergency days and patients were either accommodated on extra beds or were sent home.

Last year, the government enforced Medical Teaching Institutions Reforms Act, which allowed the teaching hospitals to have their own management and take independent decisions on the advice of their respective Board of Governors.

To resolve the chronic issue of shortage of beds, the KTH introduced ‘bed management’ system to allow the critical patients to be admitted in emergency in a non-emergency ward. Previously, beds in other wards remained empty but patients were admitted only in emergency wards.

Each of the wards with emergency is required to take all the patients for 24 hours owing to which all the beds are occupied soon. At the same time other wards remain calm with empty beds but as a rule patients had to be admitted to emergency ward only.

Each of the five medical and surgical wards has emergency on rotational basis during which the wards take both cold patients from the OPD and serious ones from the accidents and emergency department.

“The new rules adopted last year to increase admission, operations and diagnostic procedures, have paid off. Now patients from emergency wards can be admitted in non-emergency wards where beds are available,” Farhad Khan, the media and protocol officer of KTH, told Dawn.

He said that they were in the process to put in place a system of centralised bed management and get feedback about services being provided at 35 different wards with different specialties, 20 operation theaters and diagnostic departments on daily basis.

The new policy was meant to allot beds to patients anywhere in the hospital instead of laying them on benches. “The administration has allowed admission of children on unoccupied beds in dermatology wards where space exists,” he added.

Mr Khan said that wards with low bed occupancy were used to accommodate patients from the overburdened ones. “The new policy has helped patients of medical, surgical, orthopedics, children and gynea obstetric wards to get beds,” he added.

The hospital received 1,301,628 patients, including 605,887 at accident and emergency department, 695,741 at OPDs of whom 89,894 were hospitalised and 33,555 were operated upon in 2016 besides carrying out investigation of 762,074 patents.

Published in Dawn, January 6th, 2017