Dengue scare: Hospital face space crunch; doctors overloaded

Mounting cases of dengue have led to a serious space crunch situation in hospitals as patients struggle to secure beds in there while doctors claim that they are getting overloaded with work.
Even as health and civic authorities have stepped up efforts and initiated a slew of measures to contain the health menace, number of people suffering from the mosquito-borne fever has crossed 2,000, out of which around 1,200 were reported in the last two weeks.
Grappling with beds shortage, several hospitals have started emptying wards belonging to other departments to accommodate dengue patients.
"We have done a complete reshuffling of beds from all our departments. Fever clinics have been opened in the isolation ward near the emergency. We have emptied eye and ortho wards to accommodate dengue patients," said Savita Babbar, Medical Superintendent at the Deen Dayal Hospital.

AIIMS has asked other departments to reserve at least two beds each for dengue patients but even then there is a beeline of patients on stretchers outside the emergency ward.
Even the critically-ill dengue patients are being treated on stretchers in corridors due to lack of beds.

"We are giving treatment to critically-ill patients suffering from dengue on stretchers. We have no other options...The ICUs are full and we can't transfer them to other hospital as their condition is critical," said a senior doctor at the AIIMS.
At Safdarjung Hospital, patients are receiving saline drip while lying on the floors or waiting on stretchers even as three patients are sharing a bed.

While, Delhi government has asked all hospitals to open fever clinics, lack of space hampering the efforts to attend to patiensts.
"We had to open fever clinics in the driver's room. There is resentment among drivers as we have taken away their rooms, but we don't have space otherwise," said Amita Saxena, Medical Superintendent of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital.
To handle the rising dengue cases, Delhi government had yesterday ordered 600 new beds to be set up at three hospitals in Janakpuri, Ashok Vihar and Tahirpur areas.
"Out of 960 beds, almost 370 are already being occupied by 600 dengue patients. Nine wards are occupied by dengue patients. Even that is proving inadequate," said Bara Hindu Rao Hospital Medical Superintendent, V K Khurana.

Also, the doctors said that they were overloaded with work.
"In four hours, I had to tranfuse blood in 30 patiensts. There is a heavy rush and there is panic among people. They don't want to wait and we are falling short of people to deal with the rush," said a doctor at the Lok Nayak Jaiprakash Hospital.