ARCHIVED - Two of the three elevators in the Virgen de la Arrixaca Hospital have been broken for a month
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
Patients and visitors have been forced to wait up to half an hour to use the sole working lift in the Murcia hospital
Two of the three lifts have broken down in the in the main building of the Virgen de la Arrixaca Hospital in Murcia, creating a bottleneck of patients trying to access healthcare facilities and of family and friends wanting to visit loved ones. Relatives of patients at the hospital have complained that that this problem has been going on for weeks now, and the hospital has still not been able to find a solution.
Arrixaca’s general ward has seven floors that are in use. The first of these contains the operating theatres and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), while the remaining six floors are dedicated to the hospitalisation of general patients, with a total capacity of around a thousand beds. Most people visiting the hospital, then, want to access the higher floors, and many of them either cannot or are unwilling to take the stairs.
The sheer volume of patients and relatives at the Arrixaca hospital means that the foyer area is very busy, especially at peak times, when the lifts are also used to enter from the car park in the basement and A&E floors.
One of the regular visitors to the hospital opined, “This is inhumane. You cannot have a centre like the Arrixaca without a lift service, with only one of the three lifts in operation. Every day there are queues that go all the way to the door!”
Santiago, whose father has been hospitalised on the seventh floor of the hospital since last Monday said that “getting to his room has become an ordeal. There are times when you can spend nearly half an hour in the queue because of the mass of people that forms and, on each journey, the only lift that works stops on every single floor.”
In addition, he considers this to be particularly serious at a time like the present, with the coronavirus pandemic, as “many users get into the working lift when it is completely overcrowded to avoid having to wait for it to stop again on the ground floor and then be able to go up”. In his case, despite having to go up to the seventh floor, he often chooses to use the stairs, “but there are elderly people who can’t”.
Complaints about the broken lifts have already been submitted to hospital services in writing. The Regional Ministry of Health has confirmed that “of the three public lifts, one has a broken plate and the other has a broken motor” and assured that OTIS, which is the company contracted to maintain these elevators, “is trying to solve the problem”.
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