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Date Published: 11/01/2023

ARCHIVED - Murcia hospitals stretched to breaking point

ARCHIVED ARTICLE -

Emergency rooms have seen an influx of patients with respiratory diseases that they are barely able to cope with

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Murcia hospitals stretched to breaking point

The emergency rooms of Murcia’s hospitals are being overwhelmed by the increase in respiratory viruses like the common flu and Covid-19 in recent days. This has led the health services to implement contingency plans and set up new admission beds to alleviate – as far as possible – the time that patients are waiting in the emergency room, although in some cases they have been waiting for more than 48 hours, as is the case of the Hospital Virgen de la Arrixaca in Murcia city.

In this latter hospital, they have had to make use of the emergency resuscitation service in order to relieve the pressure on the ICU, which on Wednesday was close to 90% occupancy. In the ER there, the number of patients awaiting admission continues to be close to 60 per day.

“We are taking on critical patients to lend a hand to the ICU,” explains the head of the Anaesthesia and Resuscitation Service of the Arrixaca, Carlos García Palenciano. “The most complicated thing is to reduce the number of patients who are brought up to the ward, but we have no major problems within the service, no operations have had to be suspended and the surgical block is functioning normally.”

The latest figures from Arrixaca's management show 19 admissions of Covid patients (one of them a child under one month old), two of whom are in the ICU. In addition, 10 patients were hospitalised with influenza, seven with Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and five with pneumococcus.

Read also: Hospital admissions in the Region skyrocket—Murcia Covid update Jan 10

The situation at the Reina Sofia Hospital in Murcia is not much better. In the emergency department they are attending an average of more than 330 emergencies a day, “a volume of patients that we are taking on without staff reinforcements,” says the head of Emergency, Dr. Pascual Piñera, who adds that they have been asking the Ministry of Health to hire more staff for them for some time now.

The management of the health centre assures that “this is a one-off situation” and reports that “all activity is being maintained thanks to the work of the professionals”, for which 17 beds have been made available to meet the needs of care, as contemplated in the contingency plan.

Although the increased pressure has not made it necessary to suspend operations at the Reina Sofia, on Tuesday major outpatient surgeries had to be unscheduled so that these beds could be occupied by emergency patients, as is the case with the six beds in the Hospital Detoxification Unit.

Meanwhile, the Cartagena Hospital Complex suffered from overcrowding on Tuesday, with more than 500 emergency room visits forcing patients to be lined up in corridors. “This influx to the ER caused a heavy workload to accumulate, and discharges had to be expedited to quickly free up rooms for new admissions,” said the Santa Lucia Hospital.

As the Cartagena political party MC Cartagena pointed out, “Patients treated in transit locations does not seem the best way to guarantee the universal right to decent health care.”

This Wednesday there were no patients pending admission, compared to the 20 there were on Tuesday, and as the management explained, “we are functioning normally with regard to surgical activity, tests and consultations”.

However, they recognise that on Tuesday they “did experience a difficult situation due to a peak in attendance, with a very high need for admissions”.

Other hospitals around Spain, notably the Hospital La Paz in Madrid, are also experiencing similar problems as health professionals in the country protested for better working conditions last month, similar to the UK.

Image: MC Cartagena

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