The Health Department has revealed that government hospitals in and around the Klang Valley are running out of available beds due to the rise on dengue cases over the past year.
Most of the affected hospitals have contingency plans in place, where they would place patients in non-medical wards, said Deputy Director-General of Health (Medical) Dr S Jeyaindran.
“Since the medical wards are mostly occupied, a hospital will look to other wards that are not fully utilised, such as the surgical or orthopaedic wards, to place dengue patients,” he told Malay Mail‘s Ida Nadirah.
“This is called bed-levelling and all government hospitals have a bed manager who will fill empty beds to place patients who need them.”
He said that on average, the bed to population ratio in government hospitals was 1.9 beds to every 1000 people.
The Health Ministry plans to lower the ratio to 2.5 beds per 1000 people by 2020.
“The appropriate ratio of beds for a population is 2.5:1000 … all the beds in private hospitals in the Klang Valley are at this ratio,” Jeyaindran said.
“Additional beds are needed for us to reach this ratio, but to do so, we also need more hospitals.”
In fact, he said it was easier to build more hospitals than to add more beds to existing facilities.
“We are looking at different strategies … if the hospital requires more wards and beds, then we will do that.
“We are, for example, doing this at Hospital Kuala Lumpur.”
As of January 17, the number of dengue cases has increased to 2,913 cases, up 10.6 per cent from 2,633 cases on January 10.
It was reported there were 2,561 cases in the same period last year.
