Kindness is giving patients timely care

SOMETIMES we are so caught up in the rat race that we actually forget to be kind. So, kudos to those who organised the Kindness Week #Stand Together and initiated mySalam for the B40 group of our population.

I would like to share my observations of the situation in the emergency section of two public hospitals, one in Selayang and the other in Petaling Jaya. Both are congested as the time taken to transfer patients to wards is long. This is where we can show a little kindness and transfer the patients to wards faster.

There are some wards that are very congested but there are others with low occupancy in the same hospital. For example, the medical ward on the ninth floor of the hospital in Selayang is very congested compared to the Ear Nose and Throat ward on the fourth floor. It’s a similar situation at the public hospital in Petaling Jaya where the surgical wards are very congested but the multi-discipline wards are not.

The hospital authorities may have overlooked this and I hope they will kindly look into the re-distribution of resources to minimise the transfer time.

On another matter, the doctors are very busy saving lives, hence they tend not to prioritise writing medical reports. But these reports may be urgently required by the patient who might want to seek medical help elsewhere, or by a for- eigner who is going to leave the country, or by patients who need to make insurance claims and urgently want the money. As such, I would like to suggest that we simplify the format of the medical reports, that is to make it more objective rather than subjective. Perhaps a fixed format or template that even a medical student can assist to fill in could be implemented.

I sincerely hope the authorities can look into this matter. We may not be able to have the best public healthcare in terms of facilities and infrastructure but we can rank for the best in kindness.