At La Timone hospital in Marseille, 10 of the 15 beds in the intensive care unit are taken by patients with Covid-19. For Professor Marc Gainier, the head of the service, this constantly increasing figure makes him fear a difficult start to the year. “We ask ourselves a lot of questions“, he confides in a worried tone.
In question, this fifth wave which never ceases to grow and the new Omicron threat which looms: “We feel that the load continues to rise and we must surely expect something else that may happen very quickly“, predicts the professor.”I don’t know how well we’ll be able to cope.”
The first possible answer: the evacuation of patients, as explained by Julien Carvelli, resuscitator. “We try to anticipate as much as possible the lack of places that we may have over the next few days and weeks. So we try not to evacuate patients when we are up against the wall, to always have space available.”
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The other lever is the opening of additional beds. But here, the hospital faces a major problem: the staff shortage.
“For the previous waves, we trained a lot of people and we probably didn’t know how to keep them, couldn’t offer them satisfactory contracts, couldn’t motivate them to stay.”
Julien Carvelli, resuscitator
to franceinfo
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“And today, we find ourselves in a situation where we cannot recruit qualified personnel.“, adds the doctor,”so we are struggling to increase our number of available beds to accommodate everyone.”
The evacuation of patients is therefore privileged for the moment, with other operations of this type planned this week. But it has its limits: both risky and costly, it also involves many caregivers. A staff that is already lacking in services.
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