La sheave is full. And like everywhere in Ile-de-France, the private hospital of Europe in Port-Marly (Yvelines) lacks the resources to arm more critical care beds and cope with the influx of Covid-19 patients .
“In intensive care, we have reached full capacity”, explains to AFP Atika Alami, general manager of the territory for Ile-de-France within the private hospital group Vivalto Santé, to which belongs the hospital center of Paris. ‘Europe. “What we lack to further increase our capacity is the nursing staff, mainly nurses qualified in intensive care.”
Behind a blue door stamped “Covid +”, a nurse provides pressure ulcer prevention care to an intubated patient. The young woman massages him, moves his legs while talking to him even if he is in an artificial coma.
Public or private, “everyone is charcoal,” Health Minister Olivier Véran assured Wednesday during a debate on the health crisis in the National Assembly, adding that the lucrative private sector was now taking charge of 22% of patients in intensive care (compared to 19% in the first wave).
That is a higher share than the total number of resuscitation beds deployed in the private sector before the crisis, details to AFP the Directorate General of Health.
The intensive care unit of the Private Hospital of Europe, i.e. around fifty professionals, is currently caring for 20 patients, including 11 with Covid. Patients of all types, with or without comorbidities, and the youngest of whom is 30 years old.
Empty corridor
“An intensive care unit, even if it is part of a private structure, is like a state service”, assures François Mallard, coordinating doctor. “We fill in a software, the ROR (operational directory of resources) several times a day, which expresses our availability of care for new patients. The Covid regulation calls us. We take”.
A collaboration that does not stop at the orientation of patients, because “if a patient worsens, if his oxygenation does not rise despite intubation, we call the Pitié-Salpêtrière” which comes to the rescue, says the resuscitator.
“They arrive, they make an extracorporeal circulation in the bed of the patient and then the Samu transports him”, adds the doctor, for whom this possibility is “a real relief”.
Apart from the carts filled with syringes, tubes, masks … the service corridor is empty. Not a good sign, according to caregivers: everyone is busy in the rooms.
In Ile-de-France alone, the number of Covid-19 patients hospitalized in intensive care reached 1,410 on Thursday, according to the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran.
“Today we are reaching a deprogramming rate of 40%” at the hospital center of Europe, details Atika Alami. But if these cancellations made it possible to free up staff, “these resources came to replace sick caregivers” without making it possible to open more beds, she underlines.
“The nursing staff of the services are exhausted. They have been mobilized for a year and it begins to weigh heavily on their morale,” adds Caroline Hemery, health executive. “And we do not know the road that remains to be traveled,” adds Atika Alami.
03/26/2021 10:53:40 – Le Port-Marly (France) (AFP) – © 2021 AFP
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