Covid-19: K’Bu Teaching Hospital suspends anaesthesia for urgent cases

The Korle Teaching Hospital has withdrawn anaesthesia cover for urgent cases as it transfers its anaesthesia experts to the intensive care units of the University of Ghana Medical School and the Ga East Municipal Hospital to tackle covid-19 cases in the two facilities.

“Anaesthesia cover for urgent cases will stop immediately. Anaesthesia cover reverts to emergencies only from May 27, 2020,” an internal memo of the hospital, theghanareport.com obtained, said.

This is in response to an urgent request from the National Covid-19 Committee for more specialists anaesthetics to cover the intensive care units in these hospitals.

The memo dated May 26 and addressed to the officials of the hospital including the Administrator of the Anaesthesia Department said the move had become necessary because of the increasing ICU beds at the two covid-19 management hospitals.

“The surge in severely ill covid-19 patients in Accra has increased the number of functional ICU beds in the UGMC and [the] Ga East Municipal Hospital.”

Anaesthesia is a medical treatment that prevents patients from feeling pain during surgery.

During a media briefing on May 26, the Director of Public Health of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Badu Sarkodie, announced that the country currently had 14 cases that were severe, but none were on ventilators. Three were, however, classified as critically ill.

Confirmed

A source at the Public Relations Unit of the hospital confirmed that the memo was true but indicated that it was just for a day.

The source said the country’s biggest referral hospital had stopped attending to outpatients, except in emergency cases, to prevent the spread of the virus.

Urgent vs Emergency cases

Medical Officer and a Medical Laboratory Scientist, Dr Emmanuel Addipa-Adapoe, said the move was right.

He said urgent and emergency care were different, although in both cases, the attention of the doctor, anaesthetist and other healthcare professionals was needed immediately.

“Urgent care is not as life-threatening as emergency care. For instance, someone with a laceration from a knife wound, or one with a sprained ankle needs urgent attention to stop the bleeding, or stop the pain.

“On the other hand, somebody who has acute appendicitis or Peritonitis due to ruptured appendix needs emergency attention to avoid death within the next few minutes or hours.

“So in situations where the healthcare professionals are overwhelmed with cases that have already been admitted and bed space is limited, or specialist attention cannot be divided between the limited specialist staff, in this case anaesthetists and anaesthesiologists, who are needed to keep an eye on the severe COVID-19 patients in ICU and also needed to perform anaesthesia during urgent and emergency surgeries. The urgent cases can wait….or be referred to other centres that can handle them for now until normalcy is restored.

He, however, said emergency cases like accidents, acute appendicitis, strangulated hernias, intestinal obstruction, or life-threatening infections could be handled because the patient could die.

Korle Bu’s anaesthesia department provides services including the provision of intensive care services for critically ill patients, anaesthetic services for all surgical specialties in the hospital, anaesthetic services for selected patients undergoing CT scan and other radiological investigation.

It also provides pre-anaesthetic clinical services for patients being prepared for surgery and other interventions that require general anaesthesia, handles acute and chronic pain management for selected patients, as well as provides Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training for hospital staff and other institutions on request.