At the Arles hospital, the situation is critical. For the past month, the beds for Covid patients have all been regularly occupied. A new intensive care unit has been created but it is also full. 6% of patients are from Gard.
–
Since mid-February and due to the pandemic, the emergency department of the Arles hospital has been forced to reorganize. 5 beds previously intended for short-term hospitalizations in the emergency departments are now reserved for Covid patients in intensive care, the intensive care unit being saturated. “We are used to taking care of patients who are stalled for a few hours”, explains François Daltroff, head of the emergency Covid intensive care unit. “But we are not used to doing it over the long term and therefore the teams had to organize themselves to be able to take care of these patients over several days.”
Constantly busy covid beds
Located in the Bouches-du-Rhône but 35 kilometers from Nîmes, the Arles hospital center currently accommodates 809 Covid patients. And since the start of the year, 6% have come from the Gard. The hospital manages for the moment to absorb the influx of patients but is close to saturation on a daily basis. This Wednesday, April 14, all the beds reserved for covid patients are occupied, and this is no exception as stated by Mohamed Hamila, doctor in the Covid intensive care unit of emergencies: “The 5 Covid beds in our service are practically always occupied and the activity continues to increase … We manage to relieve a little bit to get 2-3 patients a day but every day it fills up and we turn to full throttle ”. Almost half of the planned operations have been rescheduled.
The whole region in a situation of hospital saturation
A situation far from isolated: of the 13 departments of Occitanie, 9 are saturated. In the Gard, hospital pressure reached 114%.
Figures that worry the medical staff of Arles, especially since the admissions curve has not yet reached its peak. He fears that new patients from the Rhône-Alpes region will be added.
Robert Grinand, anesthesiologist in the intensive care unit, hopes for an improvement in the coming weeks: “These are young people returning at the moment. We are doing the maximum but we are short of places and it is complicated ”.
–
Continue reading on these topics
–
–
