As the fight against COVID overall enters the critical phase, PUMCH keeps optimizing its response strategies and making dynamic adjustments in light of its actual conditions. With the overall target of ensuring patients’ health and preventing critical illness, the whole hospital makes concerted efforts to provide the best care to patients.

Faced with the new challenges in epidemic prevention and control, PUMCHers keep in mind their responsibilities for and commitment to patients, and their action puts on full display their professionalism of “holding life in awe and providing dedicated and compassionate care to patients to save their lives”. In line with the principle of working in a “law-abiding, scientific, standardized and orderly” manner, the hospital has established, through trial and error, a relatively sound treatment process and emergency treatment plan. Though the work performance of staff members has been weakened to varying degrees due to infections, all departments and offices prioritize care to patients in acute and critical conditions. All PUMCHers, be it front-line doctors, nurses, administrative and medical supporting staff, including medical guides, security guards, cleaning and other service personnel, stick to their post and work hard unostentatiously, as they always do, doing their utmost to ensure the steady and orderly provision of medical services.

For days in a row, the hospital has picked up the pace to expand the capacity of emergency care and the fever clinic through renovations and enhance their capabilities and also improve their settings and conditions; it has also urgently expanded quarantine wards available through building or renovation to accommodate COVID-positive patients who aren’t well enough to be discharged yet. For COVID-positive patients who need regular medical services, care will be provided to them “in different areas and during different time periods”, a reasonable principle. For example, the staff fitness center adjacent to the hemodialysis center was vacated and converted into a temporary place for hemodialysis, and bedside hemofiltration is now used as a transitional treatment plan for COVID-positive patients. Such measures together ensure the continuity of treatment for hemodialysis patients.

To satisfy the needs of people with chronic diseases and the elderly for regular follow-up consultations and medication pickup, the hospital has increased the availability of online services such as online consultation, examination appointment-making, medication prescription and medication delivery. This way, patients with immediate needs can enjoy the convenience underpinned by the “cloud-based PUMCH” faster and more efficiently, which ensures the continuity of care to them. If the outpatient specialist booked by the patient is infected with COVID, the hospital will offer online services, reschedule the appointment with another doctor on the same day or with the same doctor but on a different day, three options all aimed to ensure that the patient can get the services as soon as possible.  

At 12:00 p.m. on December 8, the weekly multidisciplinary consultation for rare diseases (MDT) was held on schedule in the outpatient center for intractable diseases, PUMCH. Dozens of experts from 34 departments across the hospital consulted for a 27-year-old patient with bilateral insula-operculum-basal ganglia syndrome face to face and thoroughly discussed his next treatment step. More than 40 experts from rare disease teams, representatives from member hospitals of the rare disease collaborative network, postdoctoral fellows and students participated online. This offers a glimpse into the painstaking efforts that PUMCH has made to deliver for patients despite the many COVID-induced challenges.  

Facing the daunting task of treating patients in acute or critical conditions and those with intractable or rare diseases and at the same time the personnel shortage caused by infections of healthcare workers, the hospital leadership steps forward to provide guidance and command, and everyone else, particularly the Party members, management personnel and young physicians, never for one second shy away from their duties and responsibilities, doing their best to minimize the impact of the infections on the provision of medical services.

The Department of Infection Control has been improving the processes of epidemic prevention and control for many days, quickly and precisely carrying out emergency response to COVID-positive cases and ensuring the safety of doctors and patients alike. The Department of Anesthesiology has scheduled core members to be on-call at home, requiring them to proactively and timely fill in vacancies under special circumstances; it also holds the implementation of the tripartite surgical safety verification system to more exacting standards to fill loopholes in medical safety. As the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology has a shortage of manpower, professors not older than 60 have stepped forward, ready to work in the frontline any minute. The Department of Medical Affairs and the General Office of West Xidan Campus have coordinated with the Department of Internal Medicine, the Department of Surgery and many other departments to arrange for vacancies to be filled in by colleagues with the corresponding qualifications. The Party Branch of Eye and ENT called for Party members and members of the Communist Youth League to assist key outpatient posts, to which young colleagues answered with enthusiasm and action. When faced with critical challenges like these, PUMCHers always step forward to take substantial and brave action.  

The hospital cares for the health of its staff, which helps deliver better care to patients. It has established a mechanism for long-term psychological counseling which can provide psychological support at any time; it has also strengthened personal protection of staff to avoid cross-infection to the greatest extent; a hospital-level team of comprehensive supporting services works with various departments to provide catering and vaccination in a meticulous manner, among other specific services provided.

Tasked with providing medical care under this new stage of COVID controls, PUMCH always commits itself to the patient-centered tenet and treats patients like family. The hospital will strive to surmount all challenges, continuously optimize and adjust the diagnosis and treatment process, and proceed with medical service provision in an orderly manner, doing everything possible to meet people’s medical needs and ensure their health.

The PUMCH joint prevention and control mechanism holds daily work meetings, which totaled 140 as of December 14

The MDT consultation for rare diseases

Reporter: Li Yuanjing and Yan Xiaobo

Picture courtesy: Chen Mingyan and Sun Liang

Translator: Liu Haiyan

Editor: Wang Yao