Covid intensive care unit in Darmstadt: “Too many are dying” – team leader reports from everyday hospital life

• The Corona-Crisis also has the hospitals in Hesse firmly under control.
• The deputy head of Covid-Station of the Darmstadt Clinic tells about his everyday life.
• Gunnar Gölzenleuchter: “Although we fight so hard for everyone who is sick, too many die.”
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With the number of infections currently falling, the situation on the Covid wards in hospitals is also slowly easing. The Darmstadt Clinic, Coordinating hospital for southern Hesse, wants to show what was really going on in the wards at the request of employees.

In several reports, the employees of different wards of the hospital receive a voice and tell how they fared. We publish your descriptions here in full.

The deputy head of the hospital’s Covid intensive care unit reports on his work

Darmstadt – Gunnar Gölzenleuchter, deputy head of a Covid intensive care unit and intensive care nurse at the Darmstadt Clinic: “I am the deputy head of a Covid intensive care unit. Right now I just feel tired and exhausted. For weeks I – and of course my colleagues too – have been doing several jobs in a row. Corona Also does not spare us who have learned to protect themselves in the professional environment: Some colleagues have Corona themselves and are absent. As a team leader, I am on duty like all my colleagues Patient – Actually, as always, I would have administrative tasks to do, but I won’t get to that until after the end of duty.

We work on one Intensive care unit and are therefore used to the fact that patients also die inside. But what we are currently experiencing is different. The patients we see here all have the same thing Clinical picture. They are between the ages of 40 and 80, and the Course of disease in its phases is often very similar and so aggressive. Although we fight so hard for everyone who is sick, too many die.

Corona: Numerous Covid deaths in the intensive care unit

It is very stressful for all of us that our patients are highly motivated, but with extremely low oxygen levels in the blood on ours Station come, all of them very exhausting Therapeutic measures willingly participate. For example, breathing with very high oxygen concentrations, the so-called High-Flow-Sauerstofftherapiethat is really exhausting and stressful for the patient. From the very beginning, however, we ourselves have the fear in the back of our minds that it could lead to a tragic course that we cannot always prevent, although we try with all our might.