4,000 patients referred to private hospitals

JEDDAH: The Health Ministry last week transferred 4,046 patients to specialized hospitals because of lack of required medical services and shortage of beds in its hospital, reliable medical sources have said.
According to the sources, quoted by local media, 2,780 cases received by the emergency divisions were transferred to other hospitals because a specialized doctor was not present, while 263 were transferred for other reasons.
Suleiman Ahmad Al-Sharie, supervisor of the Ehalati program, said the ministry rescued about 80 cases received by the emergency divisions of the hospitals.
“The ministry has devised the Ehalati program to serve patients as quickly as possible by coordinating with other specialized hospitals where the required medical service and procedures are available,” he said.
“The program registered 2,284 cases of which 56.5 percent of the total number of the referred cases was accepted via the automated system. The program also registered 1,365 cases (33.7 percent) in bad need for immediate intervention,” he said.
He said that about 300 patients were treated at the same hospital where the cases first admitted, about 7.4 percent of the total, and there are still about 97 on the waiting list, 2.4 percent which will be treated in the coming days.
The number of cases involving rescuing the lives of patients were 80, he said, adding that emergency cases were 932 (23.04 percent).
“The number of hospitalized cases stood at 938, about 23.18 percent of those received, while the number of cases referred to outside clinics were 2,096, about 51.8 percent of the total of number of cases registered in the system.”
Ehalati is an electronic program devised and implemented by the Ministry and provides mutual medical advice between different health institutions in the Kingdom without the necessity to transfer the patients unless the health case requires so. It also provides all the logistics and coordination procedures needed to refer the patient from one hospital to another.