The Yokohama city government has formed a special team to provide unified assistance for coordinating hospital transfers to maintain the health care system over the New Year's holidays in the face of rising novel coronavirus infections.
Local governments have been assigning coronavirus patients to hospitals, but this is the first attempt to create a unified system for coordinating hospital transfers that also includes other diseases.
To find hospitals for coronavirus patients, the city previously created a coordination headquarters it calls Y-CERT that has exerted control over hospital beds throughout the city.
The special team, which began operating Tuesday and will continue through Sunday, will station alternating pairs of doctors with disaster medicine experience at city hall. Each hospital will also have a doctor in charge to exchange information with the team.
Hospital beds throughout the city will be managed by taking into account factors such as non-coronavirus patients and the availability of beds.
"We'll efficiently rotate beds throughout the region according to the division of roles among hospitals to make effective use of the limited number of beds," said Ichiro Takeuchi, a professor of emergency medicine at Yokohama City University, who is the team's principal medical officer.
For example, the team would step in if a coronavirus patient whose condition is becoming critical at one hospital cannot be transferred to a more advanced medical institution because its beds are full.
The team could coordinate moving a non-coronavirus patient at the advanced medical institution to a different hospital that could accept the person, which would allow the coronavirus patient to be transferred.
"Hospitals themselves usually coordinate transfers, but there's a shortage of staff during the New Year holidays," said the director of the Yokohama municipal health policy section. "With the help of the special team, we can continue to smoothly accept patients with coronavirus and those with other diseases."
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
