Bed

Patient transfers within the public-health sector and even between the public and private sectors can take a lot of time, resources, and frustration to achieve. In healthcare, we do not always have the luxury of time when a patient’s life is at stake, and we generally do not have enough human resources to dedicate medical staff to phoning around various facilities to find a bed and an appointed physician to accept a patient.

Hospital admissions for Jamaica have been traditionally high, especially with the level of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among our population. Often, there is a bottleneck in accident and emergency departments, with patients sleeping in chairs and, in some cases, in stretchers, as they wait for an available bed to be identified. This is a major issue for us because our hospitals are always operating at peak levels, especially in the accident and emergency departments.