Cape Town – Covid-19 has forced the Western Cape to think differently about how it does things, enabling it to provide better services to its residents, even after the coronavirus pandemic threat has passed.
Western Cape Premier Alan Winde said on Friday – while announcing the province had recorded an additional 34 Covid-19-related deaths (54 were reported yesterday and 65 deaths on Wednesday), bringing the total number to 1 653 – it's the only province with the same unique patient identifier across all of its health department services.
This makes it easy to access patient information, which is evident in the work the department is doing in the management of Covid-19, Winde said.
This has assisted the province in conducting 287 735 tests, with 1 629 hospitalisations, as of 1pm on Friday. It has 14 628 active cases of Covid-19, with a total of 57 260 confirmed cases and 40 979 recoveries.
Some of the innovative and technological advances currently in operation include:
* The CTICC Hospital of Hope is entirely paperless, meaning that there are no patient files, or pieces of paper which could be moved around and potentially spread the virus.
* Patients in the Western Cape are managed through the Bureau system which creates statistics of bed occupation across the clinical platform.
* The Western Cape Government Health, in conjunction with Aviro Health, has developed an automated Chatbot application system via the WhatsApp platform, which confirms delivery of chronic medication to our clients’ homes. It also allows high-risk chronic patients to confirm an existing appointment before accessing services at their attending healthcare facility, which means they do not have to wait in long queues when going to a facility.
* Two robots, Quintin and Salma, are part of a digitisation project at Tygerberg Hospital, which uses cameras and tablets to monitor patients and capture their records, also helping to reduce infection in ICU wards.
"Beyond the technical innovations which we have introduced, we have also introduced new systems and services which are aimed at making life simpler for our residents and our healthcare workers," Winde said.
"The Red Dot Taxi service helps to keep our healthcare workers safe in specially equipped and regularly sanitized taxis. The Red Dot service also transports residents who need to go to our isolation and quarantine facilities.
"Our chronic healthcare medicine delivery service now also delivers medicine to stable chronic patients, reducing crowding in our healthcare facilities and at the same time protecting residents who fall into our risk categories.
"Covid-19 has forced us all to think differently about how we do things, and has introduced a "new normal" for people around the world. These new systems could help us to provide better services to our residents, even after the threat of Covid-19 has passed.
"We should all be embracing the new normal and determining how we can do things differently ourselves to help stop the spread, in addition to the golden rules of hygiene, sanitation, mas wearing and social distancing."
More data is available at https://coronavirus.westerncape.gov.za/covid-19-dashboard