Hospitals get oxygen rush

Jamaican hospital administrators exhaled on Monday as new supplies of oxygen flowed into cylinders, breathing new life into a healthcare system starved of reserves amid a suffocating wave of coronavirus infections.

Predawn collection of imported oxygen at the Port of Kingston and rapid deployment of trucks to the neediest hospitals offered relief to healthcare staff forced to juggle limited resources in a grim gamble of life and death.

Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), the country’s main trauma facility, received 3,000 water columns of oxygen on Monday, which was now “a comfortable state”, according to Chief Executive Officer Burknell Stewart.

KPH, whose ISO tank has current storage of 3,600 while the portable unit is at 700, did not teeter on the brink like the Mandeville and Cornwall Regional hospitals that ran desperately low late last week.

Stewart revealed, however, that the hospital was at the threshold of concern last week.

On Sunday, KPH received 10 cylinders and the Victoria Jubilee Hospital, eight.

“Geography has played a magnificent role in all of this, in that, we are very close to the source and once dispatched, within half an hour or less, we would get that supply,” he said, adding that KPH has a good working relationship with Industrial Gases Limited (IGL), Jamaica’s sole producer of medical oxygen.

Stewart said, however, that hospital managers would not let down their guard because inventory was at a satisfactory level.

The 539-bed hospital has 132 COVID-19 patients, 15 of whom were on high-flow oxygen up to last week.

Stewart estimated that about 50 per cent of the remaining patients were receiving oxygen support and patients in ICU were more than likely dependent on oxygen.

The CEO revealed that a third 32-bed ward was created for COVID-19 patients on Sunday. Based on trends, some 20 patients currently waiting in A&E are likely to be COVID positive.

“The difficulty is that once a patient comes in at A&E and that patient is admitted, it takes sometimes eight to 10 hours or even longer to ascertain the COVID status of that patient,” Stewart told The Gleaner.

“We actually have them in an area where they don’t intermingle that much and caution is taken because every patient is considered positive until we can prove otherwise.”

STAFF TURNOVER

KPH was not badly affected by the two-day sick-out by nurses that ground operations to a halt at several hospitals islandwide.

Ten nurses resigned in August, but 25 have been hired within the last two weeks.

The hospital will also be recruiting two medical technologists to boost its capacity to swab patients for COVID-19.

KPH has some 30 social cases. The CEO described the situation as a “revolving door”, with social patients returning to the hospital shortly after being taken in by shelters.

“Part of it is the security here – they are being fed, they are being kept clean, and they are in a secure environment, but that is taking from our capacity to care for genuinely ill persons,” he said.

Stewart also pointed out that the hospital has an almost equal number of mental-health cases, some of which are also medical.

But KPH has also had difficulty transferring these patients to Bellevue, the island’s mental-health facility, as the hospital has scaled down operations.

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Stewart said the hospital has been managing trauma cases well.

“The avoidable is my problem. Everyone who is trigger-happy, everyone who has an uncontrolled temper that leads to somebody being hospitalised creates unnecessary problems,” he lamented.