Establishing an ambulance dispatch system for intrahospital transfers in a large teaching hospital in India

Abstract

During the Covid Pandemic, a lot of structural and process changes had to be made in a quick time in almost all the hospitals to accommodate the patients and admit them with the least exposure to the Hospital Staff and the bystanders of the patients. AIIMS Hospital in New Delhi India is a premier tertiary care teaching hospital, which is spread out in different areas. Two Hospital centers of AIIMS were designated as COVID Hospitals. Since there was no previous experience of intrahospital transfers of this magnitude, the hospital had to face lots of difficulties in such transfers and this translated into increased turnaround time. This paper concentrates on the mechanisms in which the Department of Hospital Administration found out the various issues plaguing this process. Later by Change Management, an Intervention was brought in, which helped in the framing of a standard operating procedure that helped in the easy transfer of the patients which was hassle-free and which continued to the second wave of the COVID pandemic.