• The Sengkang General Hospital and Singapore General Hospital asked those with non-critical conditions to avoid visiting their A&E departments
• Priority will be given to those critically ill
• SKH said it has experienced a spike of 20 to 30 per cent more A&E patients over the last three days
• Patients at both hospitals said they had to wait a while for their turn

SINGAPORE — Two hospitals, namely the Sengkang General Hospital (SKH) and the Singapore General Hospital (SGH), have urged people to avoid visiting their accident and emergency (A&E) departments if their conditions are not critical, because there are a high number of patients and long wait times.

“Our wards are also running at full capacity at the moment. We request (that) you seek medical care at a general practitioner or polyclinic if your condition is not critical,” SKH wrote in its Facebook page on Saturday (May 1) morning.

There has been a spike of about 20 to 30 per cent more patients at its A&E department over the past three days compared to its daily average, an SKH representative in response to TODAY’s queries.

Similarly, SGH put up a Facebook post on Friday morning saying that it is seeing “a high number of patients” at its A&E department. 

Priority will be given to those who are critically ill, which means that waiting time for other patients will be longer, it added. 

Both hospitals will allow only one person to accompany the patient who needs the emergency aid. SKH and SGH are both hospitals under the SingHealth public healthcare group.

The announcements from the two hospitals came on the back of news of a Covid-19 cluster at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), which consisted of five employees and eight patients as of Friday. Three more cases were reported on Saturday, bringing the cluster to 16 cases.

The health authorities have said that patients have been diverted to other hospitals and away from TTSH, where four wards have been locked down to control the viral spread.

When contacted for the reasons behind the tighter measures, both SGH and SKH explained that the measures were meant to control crowd flow and preserve healthcare capacity for patients who are in greater need of medical help.

Dr Kenneth Tan, head and senior consultant of the SGH’s department of emergency medicine, said in response to queries from TODAY on Saturday that the hospital has also been seeing a higher-than-usual daily number of patients at its emergency department.

He did not provide figures but added: “We do not turn away any patient who comes to our emergency department to seek medical attention. In order to maintain the crowd situation as well as ensure that safe distancing measures are upheld, we will only be allowing one companion for each patient.”

Those with non-emergency conditions such as a cold, sprain or stomachache are encouraged to consult a general practitioner so that resources and space at the emergency department can be freed up for urgent cases, he said.

The SKH representative said that the number of people turning up at its emergency department fluctuates daily and can exceed 350 cases on some days, which will affect wait times.

“The wait times for potentially life-threatening or medically urgent conditions are short. However, patients with less acute conditions make up about half the total cases seen at the emergency department,” she said.

When asked whether the recent spike in cases were linked to the developments at TTSH, the SKH representative said that due to daily fluctuations, the greater number of A&E cases “may or may not be directly correlated to TTSH redirecting all non-life-threatening emergency department cases to other hospitals”.

She added: “We would like to remind the public to seek medical treatment at the emergency department only for serious, urgent and life-threatening emergencies. 

“For common and minor medical problems, the first place for medical help remains the family physicians in the neighbourhood.”

TODAY has reached out to the Ministry of Health for comment.

A&E SITUATION APPEAR NORMAL, SAY PATIENTS

When TODAY visited both hospitals on Saturday afternoon, outpatients and visitors to the A&E departments said that they had to wait 30 minutes to an hour for their turn to be called, though they did not think it was out of the ordinary. None of the outpatients interviewed said that they were diverted from TTSH. 

Based on TODAY’s observations, A&E staff members were not wearing full personal protective equipment as they did in the first few months of the pandemic. 

By Saturday afternoon, there were only a handful of people milling about outside both emergency departments, some of whom were companions of those seeking treatment. All of those interviewed said that they did not see anyone being turned away.

Retiree TG Fang, in her 80s, who was at SKH to visit her brother, said that there were relatively few people at the hospital for a Saturday. She had been visiting the hospital on the same day each week.

The fewer visitors around could be due to SKH’s one companion rule, she said in Mandarin.

At SGH, full-time national serviceman Terrence Torrevilla, 22, said that he had to wait around 40 minutes before he could go into the A&E operating theatre. 

He was at the A&E department on Saturday morning with three other relatives because he had dislocated his right shoulder in an incident at the HydroDash water attraction in Sentosa.

Describing the situation in the ward, he said: “It wasn’t particularly crowded, but you could see that the nurses were scuttling around and were busying themselves with the amount of work they had to do.”

His relatives had to wait outside the A&E department for his operation to complete. Mr Torrevilla said that he spent about four hours in the hospital.

Mr Loh Kok Weng, 46, a self-employed businessman who was accompanying his mother to SGH to treat a leg infection, said that the SGH’s A&E department looked like a regular hospital scene to him.

When shown the Facebook post from SGH, Mr Loh said it was good that the hospital was trying to restrict the number of people in the A&E who did not have to be there.

“With the Covid-19 situation and what’s going on in TTSH nowadays, you never know where an outbreak can happen. If this hospital or another hospital (form) another cluster, that will be pretty bad for us all,” he said.