Hospitals are forced to postpone heart and cancer surgery

Hospitals are forced to further scale up regular care due to the increasing number of corona patients in ICU wards. Some of them are now also postponing heart and cancer operations. According to de Volkskrant, this is evident from a tour of hospitals and IC heads.

There are now nearly 800 corona patients on the IC, the highest number since the first wave. To this are added the hundreds of regular IC patients. On Friday, the National Acute Care Network decided to further scale up the total number of IC beds, from 1,450 to 1,550 beds.

This is at the expense of other care. Until now, hospitals have mainly postponed operations for problems that do not pose an acute health risk to the patient, such as knee and hip operations. Diederik Gommers, IC doctor and foreman of the Dutch Association for Intensive Care: “But of operations that you really cannot postpone for more than six weeks, such as open-heart surgery or some cancer treatments, we said: we do not want to scale them down”, he says against the newspaper. “We are now at the point where we can no longer live up to that.”

Take it a step further

The Radboudumc in Nijmegen, among others, is out of necessity to scale this so-called class 3 care. “The operational teams check every morning what is possible, whether there is room on the ic for an operator,” a spokesperson told de Volkskrant. The situation is similar in UMC Amsterdam, says Armand Girbes, head of intensive care. Operations are being postponed, IC nurses have to divide their attention over more and more patients. “Every time we go a step further, while you actually think: that’s not possible.”

The root of the problem is not the number of beds available for the ICs. Breathing and monitoring equipment is also readily available, says Diederik Gommers. There is simply a shortage of staff, partly due to the high absenteeism due to illness. In some hospitals, he says this is above 10 percent.

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