Emergency plastic surgery

It is quite ironic to note that a person needs to wait for as long as 31 hours in order to get an emergency medical attention. Such is the case of the patients at Hutt Hospital according to a new research. Not only that; as if waiting is not enough agony, patients even risk being bumped off a waiting list if a more urgent case comes in.

A person by the name of David Kendall reportedly shattered his finger bone into four pieces and absolutely need an immediate medical attention. After fasting all day for the operation, he was told that he had been bumped off the list.

"I felt a bit of a forgery actually, because it was just a finger, but I had to use a hospital bed for 24 hours or more, that was unnecessary," says Kendall.

The main problem of this scenario is the lack of operating theatres in the hospital. Thus, patients need to wait their turn, by order of the most urgent case. In David’s case, a finger injury doesn’t really sound very urgent, does it?

Hutt Hospital’s plastic surgery unit serves a population of 1 million people, and performs 1200 emergency operations each year. These operations range from burn victims to hand injuries and skin grafts, and the operating theatres are simply not enough to cater to these needs. And the problem with lack of operating theatre access is patients get put on a queue and might wait indefinitely.

The whole process creates a bottleneck, which simply means that operations might be performed by a registrar in training after hours. Sadly, only 14 percent of patients are operated on by senior doctors.

It is obvious that the hospital needs four more operating theatres, an intensive care unit and an emergency department in order to serve their patients more effectively.