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3 comments:
http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC100304-0000091/Hospital-bed-crunch-on-Mondays-and-Tuesdays
http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC100304-0000091/Hospital-bed-crunch-on-Mondays-and-Tuesdays
Read this article in the papers today and found it really worrying. If hospital occupancy already hits 77% at its lowest during CNY, does that not mean that we have very little surge capacity in event of a national emergency?
Coupled with the recent policy shift to allow our subsidised patients to be sent to Malaysia for treatment to cope with costs and patient load, it sounds very much like we're going down the way of NHS... very worrying indeed. But maybe that's what we mean by providing first world healthcare...
Incidentally, while searching for the ST article online, googling "hospital discharge early delay ops" led to this article instead...
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23749002-hospitals-will-discharge-patients-early-and-delay-operations-to-save-pound-20bn.do
It really shouldn't be surprising.
We have all recently heard about how much the population has grown in Sg since 2003.
When was the last time you remember any new hospitals being built in Sg?
The last one was probably NUH or CGH and this year we'll be expecting KTPH to open its door soon.
With a very sizeable increase in population over the last 6-7 years, I'm amazed that our hospitals are still able to function as well as they are today.
Sure, one can always argue that with newer technologies and procedures, we can shorten hospital stays. But we should also remember that amongst the locally born citizens, we're also having a rapidly greying population who would put much more demands on the health sector.
Just like any other forms of subsidies, there'd always a resource cap on them. No two ways about it.
Would having more resources lead to increased demands? Possibly.
But thankfully we're finally moving on again and expanding our healthcare sector after quite a long hibernation.
Have been meaning to put up an entry on the bed shortage topic, but apologies about not getting round to it yet.
Will try to do so soon.
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