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Pune city needs real-time monitoring system for ICU beds
Hospitals on average have ICU beds running at a capacity of 90 to 95 per cent occupancy. During viral outbreaks, vector-borne disease outbreaks or surge in ailments in the community all ICU facilities run full, say doctors
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Finding an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed for ailing patients during an emergency has become a herculean task for family and kin due to the non-availability of a real-time dashboard for tracking beds in city hospitals. With the city population increasing by leaps and bounds to find an ICU bed, patients are forced to run from pillar to post and waste valuable time.
The absence of a system to locate available ICU beds only makes matters worse. It is high time for Pune city to have a reliable system in place to provide timely assistance to citizens and patients, said health experts.
Pune city has 899 hospitals with 19,833 total beds out of which as many as 1,200 are ICU beds. Patients with trauma injury, cardiac arrest, stroke, surgical treatment, and road accidents amongst others mostly occupy the ICU beds in city hospitals.
The ICU beds are further divided into various categories like—cardiac, neurology, surgical, trauma, medical, pediatric, isolation, neonatal, and obstetric amongst other categories. This further decreases the number of ICU beds for a specific category of patients.
Not just patients from Pune city but also from suburbs and other districts like Ahmednagar, Satara, Solapur and Kolhapur amongst others largely come to Pune city for treatment.
Dr H K Sale, executive director of Noble Hospital and Chairman of the Association of Hospitals in Pune (AHP), said, the problem has become acute and our hospital ICU always runs at full capacity.
“There is a need for a system in place which will guide the citizens and doctors regarding the availability of ICU beds. We are going to take up the issue in the next meeting of AHP and see how it can be done,” he said.
Hospitals on average have ICU beds running at a capacity of 90 to 95 per cent occupancy. During viral outbreaks, vector-borne disease outbreaks or surge in ailments in the community all ICU facilities run full. Patients admitted to the ICU also require more recovery period and the beds remain occupied for a long.
Dr Prasad Mulglikar, medical director of Ruby Hall Clinic, also agreed there is a need for a system to be in place to guide and help the patients during emergencies.
“The emergency patients that we get are of trauma, cardiac arrest, stroke, stab injury, road accidents, etc amongst others. Daily we get around 100 inquiries for ICU beds but we can provide the ICU beds to limited patients. We get inquiries from patients from other districts like Ahmednagar, Satara, Solapur etc.,” he said.
Vinod Sawantwadkar, chief executive officer (CEO) of Jehangir Hospital, said the availability of such a dashboard will not just end the hardship of patients and kin but also people who work in healthcare.
“We get several calls for the ICU beds but can’t provide beds to everyone. In some cases, we try to manage and add beds or shift some patients from the ICU to another ward, but this too has limitations. The latest advancement in technology can be utilised to solve the problem,” he said.
Dr Sunil Rao, chief operating officer(COO) Sahyadri Hospitals, said, all hospitals can help the administration or even a non-governing organisation who wants to work on setting up such real-time monitoring of ICU beds.
“It becomes difficult to arrange for ICU beds during the emergency and avoid wasting life-saving time of the patients. Many times when the ICU beds are running full we manage within our hospitals. If beds are there they are given to the patient but when the occupancy is full we have to take help from other hospitals,” he said.
Dr Sanjay Patil, chairman of Hospital Board of India, Pune Chapter, said there is no harm in starting such a real-time dashboard that can help save lives.
“The hospital association will be happy to support the administration if they start such a dashboard. Many times even the doctors face hardship when they look for an ICU bed during an emergency. The doctors have to call at least six to seven hospitals to find a bed,” he said.
Dr Bhagwan Pawar, health officer of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) said, the civic body can have a discussion with the private hospitals and see what can be done so that the citizens don’t have to run from pillar to post in search of ICU beds. ‘During Covid-19 such a dashboard was started and worked as a boon for the patients,” he said.
Dr Madhur Rao, deputy medical administrator at KEM Hospital Pune said that the need for ICU beds goes up during seasonal diseases like dengue or epidemics like Covid-19.
“The common dashboard system to map the availability of ICUs during COVID-19 was beneficial to the patients and can be continued. Real-time updating will be difficult but the system can be updated once or twice a day,” he said.
Ruby Hall Clinic
120 ICU beds: 100 calls daily
Sahyadri Hospitals (6 units)
120 ICU beds: 30 calls daily
KEM Hospital
110 ICU beds: 30 calls daily
Jehangir Hospital
72 ICU beds: 20 calls daily
Noble Hospital
34 ICU beds: 15 calls daily
