Al-Qassim Health Affairs General Directorate has managed to increase the services provided to patients in need of beds at the reference hospitals in particular, to a rate of 738 additional patients/ a month and 8,865 patients/ a year, given that the average of the patient stay at a hospital amounts to five days (in surgery, internal, pediatric and other sections). At the beginning of the current year, the Directorate has formed a committee to audit the files of long-stay patients over two phases. The first one included discharging 123 patients, out of 142 patients, to their homes, after providing them with the medical devices they need, training their accompanying relatives and scheduling those patients discharged from hospitals within the Home Health Care Program, as well as providing other services such as equipping the patients’ rooms at their homes with all they need.
As for the second phase, it comprised discharging the rest of long-stay patients from hospitals to their homes, as a first option, or referring them to peripheral hospitals according to a systematic plan that takes into account patients and their health need. Another group of long-stay patients has been referred to peripheral hospitals and convalescent hospitals; in an endeavor to make benefit from the available medical teams and beds there. Thus, Al-Qassim Health Affairs General Directorate has raised the bed utilization rate after processing the length of patients stay at hospitals.