28 Jul 2011
By Joan Chew
Cover Story Medical treatments can be done where you live, either by yourself or by trained staff. Mind Your Body homes in on this trend
Most people would not want to stay in a hospital if they had a choice – even if the room was well-furnished, the food delicious and the service warm.
At the same time, the need for hospital beds has become more pressing recently, with more patients being admitted, possibly due to the ageing population.
Six public hospitals here admitted 7.5 per cent more patients in the first three months of this year than the same period last year, The Straits Times reported last month.
The rise in the number of inpatients in both 2008 and 2009 were less than 1 per cent a year.
For these reasons, hospitals here have been working to shorten hospital stays or keep patients out altogether.
In the past decade, they have introduced services where hospital staff visit discharged patients in their homes for rehabilitative care or to manage their chronic conditions.
More recently, in the last few years, they have also introduced programmes that allow patients with certain acute conditions to be treated at home, instead of being hospitalised.
Faster recovery at home
Active treatment of medical conditions at home requires greater responsibility from patients and their caregivers.
These patients also have to be screened by the hospitals to ensure that they do not have other medical conditions which require treatment at the same time.
For example, at Singapore General Hospital (SGH), patients have to be assessed by an experienced doctor, who is at least an associate consultant, before they can take up the option of home treatment for deep vein thrombosis.
Dr Ng Heng Joo, a senior consultant at the department of haematology at SGH, said that the push for home treatment, where possible, is obvious.
He said: “Everybody deserves to be at home, not in the hospital.”
Being at home puts patients at greater ease and increases their quality of life. This, in turn, promotes a faster recovery, said Dr Kang Mei Ling, a consultant at the department of infectious diseases at SGH.
Not having to stay in hospital also reduces the risk of patients picking up hospital-acquired infections, such as the methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria, she added.
MRSA bacteria, which is spread through contact with contaminated surfaces, infected persons or carriers without symptoms, is harder to kill and can be deadly for the sick.
Dr Kang said: “With advances in medical science, we are putting patients on more chemotherapy, performing more organ transplants and implanting more medical devices.
“Even as we work to keep infection rates low, the absolute number of infections will increase.”
Finally, being treated at home will reduce health-care costs, as inpatient care is always more expensive than outpatient care, she added.
Mind Your Body talks to three patients who either had self-care or had medical staff treating them in their own homes.
Click here for JPEG format
« Back to previous
page
back to top