Chapter 590: [590] The patient’s life is hanging by a thread Chapter 590: [590] The patient’s life is hanging by a thread “The nurse tried to measure her blood pressure with an electronic sphygmomanometer, but couldn’t get a reading. The monitor wasn’t hooked up yet. I had administered an injection to the injured and drew blood for them, but they insisted on doing it themselves. They couldn’t draw blood on their own, so they asked an intern to perform a venous cutdown without a teacher present, yet they never thought of giving the patient an order for a CT scan first.”
Were they talking about the emergency room of their alma mater’s affiliated hospital? Sun Yubo and Tan Kelin, who were listening at the scene, were quite surprised.
“Beidu Third’s ER is quite chaotic,” Shi Xu recalled.
“Have you been there?” Liu Chengran asked.
Though all of them came from Beidu, there are several affiliated hospitals in Beidu, and they might not all have worked at Beidu Third.
“Senior Cui just got transferred to Beidu Third Hospital General Surgery as the deputy chief. He complained to me on the phone last week that the ER there is a complete mess. Several times they almost let patients die before remembering to call surgery.”
“It’s the only tertiary hospital in the area, so all patients are sent to Beidu Third. The ER only has twenty beds, which is far from enough. They’re reluctant to take in patients, efficiency is low, and they just try to force patients to leave or transfer to another hospital. The issue is, some of the patients can’t be transferred at all.”
“Can’t they treat them in the ER and then admit them to the surgical ward?”
“How can a surgical ward have spare beds available all the time for the ER? That’s why the number of beds in the ER must be sufficient, to share some of the patients that don’t need immediate surgery with the wards. Guoxie’s ER building has sixty observation beds, claiming to be the best ER in the city, and even those are always full. What can Beidu Third do with just twenty beds? Patients from other hospitals end up sleeping in corridors, whereas our hospital is one of the better ones, with virtually no corridor beds.”
Liu Chengran and Sun Yubo understood: they indeed worked in one of the top-tier tertiary hospitals in the country, superb in capability.
“Hospitals talk about bed turnover rates. The turnover rate of surgical beds at Beidu Third is too low; they can’t free up beds for emergency surgical patients. After surgery, when there are no beds available, they argue with the ER, criticizing them for sending patients that aren’t urgent to surgery. The ER, unhappy to be criticized, decides not to take patients in, hoping they will leave on their own. Senior Cui was transferred to tackle the turnover rate of the general surgical beds,” Shi Xu said. “But in his opinion, before the new ER building is completed, there’s no hope for those in the ER to change their ways of taking in patients whenever possible and stalling when they can’t. Sooner or later, a major incident will occur.”
Hearing his words, everyone else felt a pang of dread: the patient’s life was hanging by a thread!
Ordinary people think of taking the patient to the best hospital, but good doctors in good hospitals need time to save lives; a slightly less prestigious hospital might actually be better.
“It’s my fault. Teacher Tan, I only considered the patient’s condition and didn’t think about other lethal factors. I should have taken a more comprehensive view before deciding where to send the patient,” Xie Wanying said from across.
The student said she had learned her lesson. What Tan Kelin was thinking, however, was whether his hearing was deceiving him. He wondered if she had noticed the change in her voice; he, as her teacher, certainly had: her tone had a raspy hoarseness tinged with moisture, was she about to cry?
Cry over this matter? Strange. She must have encountered similar situations before. Why cry this time? Previously he and other teachers had found it difficult to get her to show any emotion, trying to affirm she wasn’t a stone-cold person.
Unconsciously, Tan Kelin’s stern voice softened a little: “Are you sure there was no other doctor present?”
“No, a nurse only called an internist over, a Doctor Ye.”