How Disease Spreads In A Hospital's Emergency Ward

Overcrowding increases disease spread

A casualty ward/ emergency room in a hospital is where every casualty or health emergency is brought to immediately they happen. By emergency I mean;

• People involved in fatal road or home accidents;

• Patients having gunshot wounds;

• Dying patients rejected by the smaller hospitals because they cannot handle their sicknesses due to lack of equipment and sometimes doctors and nurses required for treatment;

• Patients who suddenly developed wsevere health symptoms

There are others that come from the prayer houses and churches where they would have been sent to their early graves if someone did not decide to take them to the hospital.

The type of people you will see in the emergency room are people that are brought in gushing their life blood and within minutes, they are attended to and cleaned up.

All these people have something in common; they are dying and need immediate and specific medical attention.

I was in one of our federal hospitals recently. You know, the type in the cities where very sick and dying people go to with the hope that they will come out alive.

 I was supposed to be looking after an aunt in the casualty ward but instead, I was very busy observing the patients, the nurses, the entire health care system delivery and the environment.

And most importantly, the obvious risks the patients and the people looking after them where exposed to.

The hospital ward was always cramped

Nobody took extra time to think about the structure of the emergency unit. The ward contained no more than 15 beds all of which were occupied most of the time. 

 When all the beds were occupied, the new patients were kept in the corridors and if there were still more, the nurses lay them on the floor or sat them in wheelchairs while they looked for accommodation. 

Even the distance between two adjacent beds was negligible.

 Their equipment were high tech but the space was tiny for 15-25 patients, no two of them suffering from the same disease (or health event, gunshots for example), plus a minimum of two or three relatives watching over each patient and 7 or 8 nurses moving about doing their jobs.

Each patient was an emergency

There was,

• The terrified daughter shouting and crying over the imminent death of her siblings who where involved in a motor accident on their way to her matriculation ceremony;
• The male patient that had breasts and looked like he was six months pregnant;
• The young boy that made animal noises because he was in unbearable pain;

There was also:

• The wife that had not been told her husband’s HIV status yet

• The maniac that drove even the security guards away and tried to strangle the patients close to him (he was suffering from a cumulative effect of bad weed and cerebral malaria;

• The sickler that had been discharged but did not want to go home because he enjoyed watching nurses run up and down to save a life.

Overcrowding was a risk

All these people in this little space.

What happens when there is an outbreak or an epidemic is not rocket science. The air in this kind of place is very lethal and poisonous.

Once, the nurses failed to dress the wounds of a man who was shot on time and before long, his whole corner was infested with flies. 

Soon, the stench of the liquid seeping from his wounds chased everyone around him away.  

 Yet no effort is made to expand the ward or build an extension. 

In the case of an outbreak of a disease whose symptoms are still unrecognizable, it will take little effort for a single infected person to infect everybody in the ward be it the;

• Nurses and doctors at the table;
• The security guards at the door,;
• The already sick patients fighting for their lives;
•  Their family members looking after them.

Everybody will be at serious risk of infection.

It is very important and necessary to give sick people as much space as possible so as not to put their lives and the lives of those around them at risk.

Have you been to an emergency ward before? What type of patients did you meet?

 Did you think the place was crowded?