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Hospital emergency services have received patients with coronavirus symptoms to attend to the aftermath of the disease or doubts about the side effects of the vaccine. The staff cut has left hospitals such as the General de Valencia under minimal
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During the three waves of Covid that have hit the public health system, the saturation that the disease was causing in the Intensive Care Units. The battle against mortality was fought there and in each of the spaces that were enabled to treat patients with symptoms. Today Health reports the decline in revenue figures in these units as a small victory. Covid has come out of many hospitals, but saturation has not stopped. It is no longer so urgent and deadly, but professionals are still under pressure. Covid has been followed by the aftermath, doubts about the side effects of the vaccination and the recovery of the surgical program activity, all with fewer personnel due to the termination of the Covid contracts. There are centers where post-Covid ‘normality’ continues without giving a break.
“We are the face of the hospital and we are not treating patients as we should. They are the harmed.” They are words to El Mundo from a nurse from the Emergencies of the General Hospital of Valencia. They have raised their voices in a situation that they can no longer bear. “Right now, since the end of the Covid contracts, we are less working than those who would impose the minimum services of a strike“, he exemplifies. At night there are three nurses and the number grows to 14 during the day in 12-hour shifts. Due to the ratio of patients served by the department, one of the largest in the Valencian Community, it should be 18.” That It causes that there are people who do not have a private life because they constantly have to cover leave from other colleagues or hours of leave granted by the Department. We cannot attend well because we are not well, “he insists. His complaints to the center’s management and to the Department of Health end “with pats on the back but no solutions”. His request that the Covid reinforcements not cease was not heeded despite the structural shortage of personnel that they have dragged on since November 2018, before the hit of the pandemic.
The usual pathologies are joined by patients with persistent Covid or sequelae and those who have been vaccinated and come to the appearance of discomfort. The impossibility of contacting the Primary Care health centers means that the face-to-face visit is to the Emergency Room. The staff and the Covid circuit have disappeared and part of the care is carried out in barracks installed during the third wave to isolate positive patients. In addition, in this hospital the pre-admission of all the people who are going to undergo an operation was assigned to the service, “and there have been days of 40 admissions, which is crazy,” says this General’s nurse.
“Those who are harmed are the patients. It seems that no one is clear that this is not a factory of tables or chairs, or a screw factory, that people’s lives are at stake here. The user complains to us, with verbal assaults, but then he does not put a complaint in writing and signs it so that someone begins to realize what is happening “, assures this health.
Overtime instead of contracts
Health is aware that it needs to strengthen the work teams for the summer. In the case of nurses, as reported last Friday by the SATSE union, it has blocked the nurse bags, which were fed again with professionals who did not renew their Covid contracts. The intention is to have personnel available for substitutions as of July 1, although it has been at the cost of not reinforcing the vaccination teams.
That has meant that nurses at health centers and hospitals are doubling shifts to administer vaccines. According to the Union, these professionals may have accumulated “a total of between 1,000 and 1,500 overtime hours per day, the equivalent of about 300 hired nurses. “
Despite all this, SATSE predicts that, “adding the nurses from the Stock Exchange and those who finish their nursing degree studies this month, the Department will not have enough nurses to cover the holidays of his staff, “so he urges the Department to seek a solution to the problem, a solution that would involve using” voluntary reinforcement modules “among the nurses in the hospitals so that the vaccination rate is not affected.
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