Doctors reduce burden on their colleagues with ‘virtual hospital’

ISTANBUL

More than 60 doctors from different branches, who came together to alleviate the workload of physicians struggling with COVID-19 on the field, are providing free consultancy services to citizens on social media.

Within the scope of the project named “Virtual Hospital,” volunteer physicians who want to reduce the density in hospitals have been providing support to patients who are not in need of urgent treatment or who are afraid of going to hospital, as risks of catching the virus there are high.

Anesthesiologist Nebahat Bulut, a co-founder of the platform, helps patients who have previously gone to hospital and had a blood or urine test, an x-Ray or MR screening, but could not see their results.

Names and social media accounts of experts providing voluntary consultancy services are listed on the platform.

Volunteer physicians on the platform, including experts in many fields, are answering the questions that citizens are curious about.

Indicating that about 250 people have contacted her through this way, Bulut said that citizens were explained their conditions and the results in simple languages, as medical reports could be illegible for people not familiar with the language.

Saying that the intensive care infrastructure in Turkey is at a level that will overcome the difficulties, Bulut, however, pointed to the possibility of overcapacity.

“When 55 patients arrive at a 50-bed hospital at the same time, you have to exclude those five patients. In order not to fall into such a situation, we should leave these intensive care beds that we all need to patients who need it as much as possible,” she said.

While the number of adult intensive care beds per 100,000 people in 2012 was 20.1 in Turkey, this rate increased to 29.4 in 2018.