Some hospitals in our province are already receiving more corona patients than they should, others are still catching up with regular care. In anticipation of the announcement of new corona measures tomorrow, hospitals in North Holland are concerned about an increasing number of corona patients. “We still need to be alert and flexible.”
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For example, there are currently three corona patients in the ICU in the hospitals of the Northwest Hospital Group and fifteen in the usual nursing wards. Even though the figures vary greatly per day, it is the maximum number of patients that has been agreed in consultation with the other hospitals that the Northwest will receive.
The figures make it clear that the pressure on care in the hospitals of Northwest is still high. Due to a busy summer with corona patients, they were able to start catching up with regular care here later, compared to other places in the country.
That catch-up is still underway and is not yet hindered too much, the hospital says. But, says a spokesperson: “Scaling up is possible with increasing numbers of corona patients, but this will be at the expense of other care. We experience a shortage of staff and there is a high absenteeism. The latter is largely due to the high workload. of the past 1.5 years.”
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The Tergooiziekenhuis also shares that concerned look to the coming period. There, too, they are now treating the agreed number of corona patients: two in the IC and seven others in nursing wards. “Everything is still open with us and the catch-up program of regular care continues. But of course we also share the concerns for our own region.”
Catch-up program
At the Dijklander hospital, they are currently taking in more patients than they should, given the pressure on the region, a spokesperson said. This concerns eleven patients on the nursing wards and two on the IC. “Unfortunately, we therefore have to transfer patients to other hospitals. We do what we can together, but we also run into limits.”
Here too, according to the hospital, the staff is ‘on their toes’. “The staff shortage, in combination with an increasing influx of new patients, can lead to so-called presentation stops more often than before the corona outbreak, whereby we are temporarily unable to receive new patients in the emergency department. We also have more regular admissions stops where we temporarily do not have patients on our nursing wards. These stops occur at hospitals throughout the Netherlands, by the way.”
Water to the lips
In the ICUs of academic hospitals, the concern about hospital staffing is so great that the heads of departments jointly signed a statement. Among them are the intensivists of the Amsterdam UMC.
It is feared that due to the expected number of corona patients on the ICUs, there will be too few beds left for regular care, such as heart surgery, cancer surgery or accidents. “We are now looking for the media because the water is on our lips”, is in the statement.
In the statement, the doctors call on ‘every Dutch person to do what is possible in his or her position to greatly reduce the number of infections’. The Northwest Hospital Group also does this. They call it essential to observe the basic rules in the hospital, to test for complaints and to vaccinate. “This really has a positive effect on the pressure in the hospital.
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