24-hour monitoring for emergency services in Turkish hospitals, relief for overcrowding

ANKARA

The Turkish Health Ministry is planning to provide 24-hour surveillance for hospital emergency services across the country, and especially overcrowded ones, daily Habertürk reported on Dec. 21.

The project, which is titled “Red Light” and entails setting up a new camera-and-call system, will help the relevant authorities to immediately intervene when emergency services are overcrowded, the daily said.

The system will use SMS to notify the health minister, the undersecretary for health, the deputy undersecretary for health, the provincial governor’s office, the local health authority, and the hospital’s head doctors when emergency service are overcrowded.

Camera-and-call systems are already operational in the majority of overcrowded hospitals, the daily said.

Authorized personnel will be able to monitor emergency services through cameras after normal office hours, even if they are not present at the hospital. In the case of overcrowding, the head doctors may request other doctors to intervene.

If a hospital’s emergency department lacks a sufficient number of doctors, some patients could be forwarded to nearby hospitals. The project will also integrate ambulances. Once the system has warned of overcrowding in a specific hospital, the relevant ambulance can take patients to a less busy hospital nearby.

The project also allows certain hospital polyclinics to supplement emergency services until 11 p.m. with on-call doctors. Non-urgent cases will initially be forwarded to these polyclinics. If the system is successful, polyclinics in other hospitals will also remain open until 11 p.m.