The Buka General Hospital in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville reported an increase in road accidents with five deaths reported at the hospital so far.
The Acting CEO Dr. Tommy Wotsia stated that they have observed this since the festive season with staff being quite busy with a lot of those emergency cases at the emergency room.
“During the early week of January, we had a lot to of work for the staff at the hospital”.
Dr. Wotsia also said that the current low stock of medical drugs is not helping, because now it is putting a lot of pressure on staff when dealing with the patients.
“Our new supply of drugs comes in monthly, and all this time we are advising all the patients to purchase at their medication at the pharmacy shops”.
“Sometimes the hospital use to order drugs from the pharmacy shops using our own budget so that we could treat everyone at the hospital”.
Meanwhile, the Buka General Hospital has recorded 15 positive cases of covid-19 in the last two weeks.
Dr. Wotsia said that all the 15 cases were recorded at the out patients, which the staff were able to attend immediately to them.
He added that they are seeing a lot of patients continue coming in with common flu, which the staff are assuming to be covid-19 related, and what’s bad is that the hospital has run out of covid-19 testing equipment and they cannot confirm the patients right away.