“For an instance I thought I won’t have her back again”
Zainab’s Father said to the Emergency Room medical team who were handling Zainab Mahmoud’s case, a pretty young girl from upper Egypt who was admitted in 57357 in 2019.
After 6 months, as she had received a chemo session one week before, she arrived to the Hospital in a bad general condition. She was transferred immediately to the emergency room where ER professionals were keeping her alive till she would be transferred with no delay to the ICU as she was under constant threat of cardiac arrest.
Notice how vital the Emergency department and its team are for handling cases such as Zainab’s. They are the front row soldiers in the face of the ravaging side effects of the disease or its treatment.
The good news is that Zainab is alive and well today.
The bad news is that the present Emergency department is not fit to receive an increased number of emergency cases in terms of capacity, design, and the application of standard infection control measures.
The function of the Emergency department is to rapidly deal with emergencies that might include life- threatening situations. The core operation of this department is triage which is evaluating patients’ case severity within a short time after their arrival, allotting priorities, and transferring each patient to the appropriate place for treatment. Hence, the need for caregivers to operate in a space adequate, safe, and efficiently designed setting that enables rapid handling and close monitoring and supervision of these emergencies.
Since the hospital Inception in 2007, the ER department has seen the number of cases increase 10 times over the years with an average of 60 to 70 patients daily.
In 2013, an urgent need to accommodate the initial space of the department to receive more patients was carried out by annexing a small adjacent area belonging to the out-patient clinics.
But in 2023, this adjustment was no more adequate and a number of challenges began to resurface threatening the lives of patients and complicating the work and rescue action of the caregivers: a messy patient flow, delayed services, over crowdedness, and difficulty in applying standard infection control measures.
To overcome these challenges, there is a pressing need to increase the space allocated to the ER department and restructure its design to enable a rapid, smooth, and safe patient flow. This total renovation project will enable:
- More space for the resuscitation room.
- More space for the sampling room
- Increase waiting area for patients and families
- More space for assessment room
- Provide a new room for suspected cases for isolation
- Provide a private room for the floating doctor and nurse
- Provide 2 isolation rooms to prevent spread of infection
- Better supervision of patients through open view cubicles
Whatever amount you decide to donate to this project will enable the rescuing of hundreds of children with cancer in distress and save the lives of many more like Zainab.