Pvt hospitals worry over backlog of non-emergency ops, diagnostic tests
Times of India | 19 August 2024
Kolkata: The OPD shutdown across private hospitals on Saturday has made scheduled appointments go haywire and forced hospital authorities to defer those which could lead to a delay of three to five days on an average or a week in many cases.
This could have a chain impact and has already delayed elective surgeries and diagnostic tests for thousands of patients, who need those urgently.Hospitals have been left busy to redraw appointments with consultants and reschedule tests amid the continuing uncertainty triggered by protests following the rape and murder of the trainee R G Kar Hospital doctor. At Ruby General Hospital, OPD footfall dropped to around 100 from the normal average of 600. Only patients who needed urgent consultations were given appointments as most doctors remained absent in response to the nationwide call to stay away from OPDs. “Outstation patients who were leaving Kolkata, post-surgery patients and those who needed urgent clinical care were slotted on Saturday. All other appointments are being rescheduled over the course of next week. We already have 500 bookings on Monday, which could swell to 800. This will put a huge pressure on the system and the backlog could persist,” said Ruby general manager – operations, Subhashis Datta.
B P Poddar Hospital is ‘now working hard to reschedule appointments based on the urgency and needs of the patients’. “Several OPD-specific tests couldn’t be performed on Saturday, so we have planned to perform those within Tuesday. We expect a surge of around 20%-25% a day in patient numbers in the coming week,” said Supriyo Chakrabarty, group adviser, BP Poddar Hospital.
He added that online consultations were being offered to a good number of patients. “Our in-patient department (IPD) doctors handled some critical consultations but we had to cancel cold case surgeries like knee replacement and hernioplasty,” he said.
While B P Poddar receives around 500-550 OPD patients daily, 95% of doctors cancelled their OPD consultations, leading to a drop in patient numbers.
Consultants at Peerless Hospital, too, will be attending to more patients than usual from Monday to meet the backlog. The hospital had 330 OPD patients on Saturday, a sharp drop from the normal average of 800.
“Every doctor will have one to two extra patients from Monday,” said Peerless Hospital CEO Sudipta Mitra. Routine tests and consultations that were cancelled on Saturday are being rescheduled over the course of this week at Charnock Hospital.
Arrangements have been made to collect blood samples from home.