Ambulances and emergency departments coping with rise in patients

All the city's ambulances and hospital emergency departments are running at full speed, dealing with the rising number of patients due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to health authorities.

Authorities are asking local residents to save the precious medical resources for the elderly and patients in serious conditions.

The Shanghai Medical Emergency Center and nine rural emergency centers now have 1,251 ambulances with 4,046 staff operating. The calls for ambulances has kept rising in recent days.

The "120" call center received 51,852 requests for ambulances on Friday, 4.7 percent more than the previous day. The city dispatched 5,101 ambulance services on Friday, 2.2 percent higher than the previous day and 33.5 percent higher than the previous week. About 70 percent of staff remain on the job, despite the strong workload pressure.

An ambulance doctor, Li Zhu, said the daily workload had doubled in recent days. The majority they serve are fever patients, with some in a serious condition.

Tongren Hospital and Putuo District Central Hospital are the two district-level hospitals receiving the largest number of ambulances.

"The past 24 hours from Friday midnight to Saturday midnight, our hospital received 97 ambulances," said Ma Jun, president of Tongren Hospital on Sunday.

"About two thirds is from the Shanghai Medical Emergency Center and one third from rural centers of Minhang and Qingpu district. Our emergency department is also receiving a record high number of patients. The entire hospital is working hard to deal with large number of patients."

To improve efficiency, the hospital has streamlined its process by completing patient classification at the door of the emergency department. While one ambulance arrives, doctors and nurses are waiting at the door to separate patients into areas such as serious and critical in line with their condition and carry out treatment.

"Usually, we receive about 40 ambulances each day," Ma said.

"The extreme condition was some 100 ambulances per day during Shanghai's lockdown in March and April.

So we made pre-plans on serving 100 to 120 ambulances per day. Facing the recent rise of patients, we have expanded the emergency department from 11 beds in the rescue room to the current 40 to 50 beds and allocated more medical staff. The streamlined process also helps quicken our service to receive and arrange patients to avoid patients and ambulances waiting for beds in the emergency department."

Tongren has added more beds for serious patients and required all departments to hospitalize patients from the emergency department.

"About 80 to 100 emergency patients are hospitalized in different departments each day," she said. "All departments and medical experts are cooperating closely on the treatment of serious patients, whose group consultation should be reported each day."

Sun Jianyue, vice president of Putuo District Central Hospital, said the hospital received 62 ambulances on Saturday and rescued 103 patients (including those sent by ambulances and presenting themselves).

"Hospital officials are working in the emergency department in turn to distribute emergency patients quickly to different departments for hospitalization to avoid overload at the emergency," Sun said.

"All hospital beds are managed together to meet the demand of emergency patients at first.

"Many medical staff are COVID-infected as well. More than 60 percent of our medical staff are infected with the virus. We have tried our best to ensure the proper operation of fever clinics, as well as the infectious disease department and emergency department."

To deal with the staff shortage and support the emergency frontline, Shanghai Health Commission has dispatched hundreds of doctors to support the medical emergency centers and better arrange the medical resources to increase ambulance efficiency.

Officials said fever patients, who are in a stable condition, can go to fever clinics in local hospitals by themselves instead of calling for an ambulance.

Those with short of breath, high fever for three days after medication or quick heart beat, pregnant women with problems like nausea and headache should call 120 for ambulance. Ambulance dispatchers will send an ambulance to people with serious patients by priority.