THE National Referral Hospital (NRH) is expected to resume its normal referral services from Monday 21st February.
The hospital’s chief executive officer Dr George Malefoasi said services will resume for non-communicable diseases, patients’ reviews, surgical clinic checks and patients who have been waiting for review with chronic illnesses.
Dr Malefoasi was speaking during the Radio Talkback Show yesterday (Saturday 19th February) afternoon.
The NRH was forced to cancel its normal services and focused only on emergencies during the outbreak of the COVID-19 community transmission last month.
Dr Malefoasi said a lot of changes also happened at the hospital since the Australia Medical Assistance Team (AUSMAT) came two weeks ago.
He said one of the changes was the establishment of a special High Dependence Unit for COVID-19 patients.
“…we now have the special high dependency unit where we create at the hospital and this is the result of the AUSMAT who were here and who left yesterday.
“They help us put together this ward and this ward is very important to manage the very sick ones,” the NRH CEO said.
He said currently at the NRH 46 per cent of the beds occupied are patients with COVID infection and the rest non-COVID related illnesses.
“Now we have both COVID infection patients who admit for COVID related illness as well as non-COVID illnesses.
“We also still have non-COVID occupancy people who are sick and we also still have for example today 87 patients too are still waiting for other treatments on gynae, antenatal mothers, medical ward, surgical ward who are not COVID but who are also waiting treatment,” Dr Malefoasi said.
Therefore, he said the plan is to resume hospital services as early as this week.
He also confirmed that staff numbers have increased as the country past week four since the community outbreak of COVID-19 in Honiara.
“Staffing…we are slowing building up staff usually an average of three to four doctors, five to nine nurses with support from nurse aides that is the component of staffing at the moment.
“Week two we really suffer from staffing I think that is when many of the sick staff do not want to come to work but we are slowly back and we are going to see if we can improve on our bubble router as well,” Dr Malefoasi said.
