The flu factor in the increase in demand for hospital beds

10 Jul 2006

Since April this year, there has been an increase in influenza activity. The influenza virus normally makes people more vulnerable to serious respiratory illnesses, such as pneumonia. From less than 1% in April, the weekly average number of people tested positive for Influenza A increased to 13.5% in June 2006.

In Singapore, influenza viruses circulate all year round. Although acute respiratory infections are seen throughout the year, there are generally two peaks in infections, in April/July and November/January of each year. They correspond to increased influenza activities during winter in temperate countries in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, respectively.

Last month, there was a corresponding surge of cases of acute respiratory infections. The public hospitals saw a 10% increase in the weekly average number of Emergency Department attendances from 13,311 in April 2006 to 14,805 in June 2006. As a result of the flu factor, the number of hospital admissions of pneumonia cases from the Emergency Departments went up. The average weekly number of admissions of these cases increased from 153 in April to 264 in June.

The increase in hospital admission of pneumonia cases created a surge in workload at our public hospitals, especially at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. TTSH has taken steps to spread the patient load across other public hospitals, improved its bed management practices and operational procedures to ensure that patient care and quality are not compromised.

The flu factor seems to have peaked but we are monitoring the situation closely. A new general hospital in Yishun by 2009 will ease the periodic overcrowding in TTSH fundamentally. But until then, we are adding 50-80 beds in the other hospitals every year to help relieve the over-crowding in TTSH.