one nurse for 22 patients
The drop in influenza and covid-19 in Catalonia does not decongest hospital emergency services. Most of them continue with a lot of pressure, at the level of others pre-pandemic winters. If last week the overcrowding of emergency rooms in Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, where some patients had to wait up to 90 hours before being transferred to a ward, this is the hospital emergency department. Moises Broggi Hospitalin Sant Joan Despí, of which corridors were this Wednesday lots of sick people due to lack of beds. As is the case in other health centers, they are, for the most part, older people with previous pathology who catches a respiratory virus and decompensates.
” There are unbearable load levels. There are days when there is a shortage of nurses, which makes difficult to take good care of people, denounce the doctors who work in the emergency room of Moisès Broggi. Emergency rooms are full of covid and flu, like our whole life. “We always had people in the hallways. Because we also have There is a lack of beds: That’s why there are people in the hallways,” they add. These same doctors point out that there is a general shortage of doctors in general (in Catalonia some 9,000 doctors will retire over the next decade), but above all nurses. Satse, the majority union for nurses, believes that 24,000 people are missing in Catalonia.
According to these medical voices, in the emergency rooms of the Broggi these days there were nurses wearing 22 patients each in the emergency room. “These are patients who are there waiting for a bed, waiting to be admitted, who they need medicine, hygiene… But since there is no room, instead of being in the ward, they wait in the emergency room,” they add. All this, while the Broggi Satellite Hospitalwhich was built in 2021 to decongest the covid, remains completely empty and without patients, for lack of sufficient staff.
Model criticism
Other sources consulted by this newspaper point out that the underlying problem is the hospital emergency model in Catalonia. “The emergency department, which receives many patients, must be well organized. management model and expert professionals. And this is very difficult to achieve in Catalonia and Spain,” they point out. The pandemic, they say, has made everything worse in a country where there are still no public health concerns. there is still no specialty in emergency medicine.
The urgency is ” vital ” for the health sector. In 2019, Catalonia carried out almost nine million urgent care visits, but these must be “ordered” and in the hands of “experts”, which is difficult because, among other things, there is a lack of doctors everywhere, especially in hospital emergency rooms. ” The emergency room and the infectious, whose we lead the pandemic, we don’t have a specialty. There is a a very significant over-demand, which relates to the aging of the population, with the the accessibility of the primary, which increases the number of visits to the emergency department”.
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