Queen Elizabath Hospital

QUEEN EL I ZABETH HOSP I TAL of Infection Prevention and Control department, was responsible for that facility and my job was the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. It was all very well to say we would try to keep it COVID-free, but in retrospect, even though that was an ambitious ask, I think it turned out to be the right decision. A lot of our fellow Caribbean countries that have only one general hospital tried to divide it into COVID and non-COVID parts of the same institution and weren’t very successful. “People came to realize that having separate institutions was easier to manage. But as the only national hospital, we obviously had to deal with COVID in our Accident and Emergency (A&E) department because that’s where sick people presented. And we also had to find a way of identifying those in the wards who slipped through and transfer them to the Harrison Point Isolation Centre.” BVC: How did you innovate to accommodate the patient load? Cave: “The first big change was that the Accident and Emergency department had to be split into two, and now, three components. The first one dealing with COVID positive patients; the second with people who had a very low risk of COVID; and the third was a short-stay unit. As the pandemic evolved, our AED started to see an increase in the number of patients with chronic diseases who had been managed through our hospital specialty outpatient clinics and primary public clinic health care. They were deteriorating because they were either staying at home or not accessing appropriate care in a timely manner. “Our inpatient numbers increased – particularly the elderly with non-communicable diseases – and the severity of their illness also increased,