A successful juggling of scarce resources at Split hospital.
Emergency Surgical Unit of the Split Clinical Hospital Centre is certainly one of the busiest hospital wards of its type in the country, especially during the summer months, but it is certainly the most unsuitable space for the “21st century medicine “, as Croatian politicians like to call the health care system, reports Slobodna Dalmacija on October 29, 2015.
Over the last year, the Unit has received more than 56,000 patients, which were examined on just four hospital exam tables. That means that, on average, 153 patients were examined every day.
The unit has been using the same premises for almost 40 years, and the largest investment in that time was the new door handle on the front door, which has finally prevented that anyone can enter the waiting room. The door handle was installed during the term of general manager Dujomir Marasović, who had some other ideas for the Unit, but the money was never found.
Kolja Poljak, the current hospital manager, knows that the Unit is inadequate for doctors, nurses and patients. Poljak advocates the project of integrated emergency hospital admission which should be built at the current premises of the Clinic for Lung Diseases, which is expected to be largely financed by the EU.
Until then, the patients will be treated in two operating rooms for emergency cases, an X-ray room, and in a “outpatient ward” with four beds where patients are kept under observation. The unit has a casting room, but it is located in the immediate vicinity of the resuscitation room. So, someone who needs plaster has the opportunity to listen to doctors and medical staff trying to save the life of a person hurt in a car accident or in some other catastrophic event, just a few metres away.
It is therefore not hard to imagine how patients feel when they seek help in the emergency ward at Firule, especially tourists from, say, Sweden, Germany, Norway or the United States, who are used to much better conditions in their countries. In Split, they have the opportunity to return to the past.
