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KHMH CEO Says Beds Aren’t The Problem
posted (August 7, 2015)
There is not enough space to accommodate all patients at the KHMH. On Wednesday the hospital sent out a press release stating that they will not be admitting any non -critical patients until Monday. This is as a result of the shortage of beds at the hospital. The release says "the management of the KHMH took the decision to suspend elective admissions to the General Surgical Ward and Day Cases due to the overwhelming numbers of emergency cases." This issue can severely impact patient recovery and comfort since there is already a backlog of elective cases at the hospital. Today we spoke with the CEO of the KHMH and he told us that just buying more beds won't solve the problem.

Dr. Adrian Coye, CEO, KHMH
"As we said in our press release, recurrently throughout the year we are challenged by just surges of cases that are either transfers from the regional hospitals or just trauma cases and sometimes during the week we have beyond our capacity. Remember, the old Belize City Hospital had a capacity or 170 beds and this Karl Heusner 20 years ago was built with 105 beds capacity. So 20 years ago the population could have been around 200,000 and now we are 350,000. So already we have had an institutional frustration created and over the years it's become just much more obvious. So we cannot predict. If for example, if you have a dengue outbreak or something like that then you have a surge of patients need to be admitted, but in the end what happens, is that all these emergencies block the beds for patients who require elective care."

"Elective care, those are plan surgeries or plan studies and if the patients who have trauma or broken limbs etc., they are going to stay very long in the hospital. Now the issue of surgeries, general surgical ward has only 28 beds. This week on Monday and on Tuesday we had 10 patients needing admission to the surgery, with a ward already full. So then, in the recovery room you would have another 4-5 patients who had surgeries and are now trying to go to the surgical ward."

"This is something that we battle constantly. But we reached a point where we just cannot take any more and we have to take a break, which is essentially what we are doing this week; cleaning or getting all the cases that are lingering on the ward, so that we can create a flow for the coming week. We have beds for the number of spaces the hospital have, but beyond that we have to look at building new spaces, new clinical spaces, especially and orthopedic ward. We may have to have a ward just for the orthopedic cases. So that involves planning and construction."

There are currently about 140 beds at the KHMH. The hospital resumes admission of elective or non-critical cases on Monday.

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