The Dijon university hospital center is the largest hospital in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. He is currently treating 86 patients infected with Covid-19, including 26 in intensive care. Interview with Florent Cavalier, secretary general of the CHU.
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What is the current situation at Dijon hospital?
Florent Cavalier: The situation is currently tense. As I speak, we have 86 patients who are hospitalized for pathology with Covid-19, including 26 patients in intensive care.
Are you ready?
So of course, we are constantly adjusting our system. Currently, we are facing a fairly high bed occupancy rate, including for patients who do not have Covid-19 pathology. And also an increasing flow of Covid-19 patients.
So we have been preparing accordingly for several weeks, several months. And we adjust our device.
We will activate our level 3 mobilization plan at the request of the Regional Health Agency. In particular, this presupposes surgical deprogramming for all operations that do not involve a loss of luck.
All operations that would be urgent or not deferred at the risk of loss of luck, we will obviously take care of them. Either in the operating theaters of the CHU, or with the public and private health establishments of the territory, which will provide operating theaters for our surgical teams, so that we can ensure the continuity of the care.
For example, the Georges-François Leclerc cancer center will provide us with an operating theater, we will bring our teams. As well as the Benigne Joly clinic in Talant.
You say that the occupancy rate is important. How much is it?
The bed occupancy rate is currently close to 100% at the CHU.
What are you going to do if there is an influx of patients?
The territorial response is a very important element. That is to say that with all the establishments in the territory, we will obviously ensure that patients are transferred in a completely secure manner to ensure continuity of care.
And then we also go upgrader our devices. In particular, because we have this flow of patients with Covid-19 pathology. In our mobilization plan, we have this possibility of increasing our capacities. To bring them, especially for resuscitation, to more than a hundred beds. Today we are about fifty beds mobilized on our mobilization level 2.
Knowing that we take patients with Covid-19 and also those who require heavy resuscitation surgery. Going to intensive care is never trivial, especially now. We also maintain this critical care for pathologies other than Covid-19.
Will it be satisfactory? The announcements made on Wednesday predict fairly catastrophic figures in the next ten to fifteen days. Will even doubling your capacity be enough?
We sure hope so. Then, we hope that the government measures that were taken yesterday, in particular the confinement, will make it possible to flatten the curve and precisely allow us this breath of fresh air so that we can take charge in the best conditions. patients.
And I repeat, there are obviously patients with Covid-19, but there are also other patients for whom we cannot bring ourselves to accept a loss of luck.
Are you well provided in terms of materials and staff?
In terms of equipment, today we are very well provided. We never lacked materials in wave 1. We also had outbursts of generosity, important donations. We have never stopped strengthening our masks and our personal protective equipment. So we have no shortage of them right now. Like respirators, we have a large and sufficient number of them.
Then we can increase the resuscitation capacities. But there must also be health professionals who can be behind the operation of these beds 24 hours a day. From this point of view, we note a little absenteeism. But we will face it by organizing ourselves as well as possible to welcome all the patients.
This means that, for example on the surgical deprogramming of activities that do not fall under the loss of luck, we will be able to recover human resources which sometimes have already been trained. We have already trained during wave 1. They will be able to go and strengthen the resuscitation and medical teams.
Is the training sufficient?
For the CHU, we have set up a fairly substantial training system, with both the emergency care training center, but also a medical simulation unit. It provides a solid basic training for all the nursing staff who will come to strengthen our resuscitation teams.
We also have a sanitary reserve, as we call it. It is made up of volunteer hospital staff. These are nurses, doctors who were trained in resuscitation techniques, both during wave 1 but also after this wave had subsided.
We have never stopped training. And these volunteer professionals will also be extremely valuable reinforcements for our resuscitations and our medical units.
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