70 patients are waiting for an inpatient bed at a San Jose hospital

Early Monday morning at a San Jose hospital, 70 patients were waiting for a hospital bed, 50 of whom had been waiting more than 24 hours, nursing director at Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Central told Lusa.

The situation reflects the long weekend and the closure of several emergency departments around the hospital due to a lack of doctors to cover shifts, a situation which is affecting 39 NHS emergency services across the country this week.

According to the director of nursing at the Central Hospital University of Lisbon (CHULC), Maria José Costa Diaz, these are patients of “a higher degree of complexity.”

“These are much older people with several comorbidities and a lack of follow-up from primary health care, which increases the complexity of these patients and their severity,” emphasized Maria José Costa Díaz.

Regarding the reality experienced in the hospital, the director of nursing said that these were patients who “came from other places, from other hospitals that were closed, especially in specialized areas, and that the only response they received was actually in the multipurpose ward emergency care in the hospital.” San Jose Hospital.”

While waiting for a hospital bed, these patients are kept in the short-term observation room in the emergency department, he said.

Responding to these patients, Maria José Costa Díaz said that they would try to eventually expedite discharge and that some patients would return to their home hospitals so that “a possible answer could be given within a day.”

The person in charge stressed that an excellent way to reduce the urgency would be to care for the approximately 60 patients who are admitted and discharged while awaiting social response, a number that has nearly doubled since the summer.

“On average, we have about 60 hospitalized patients each day awaiting social response or continued care,” which means two occupied medical rooms.

“If they really gave us permission on these cases (…), it would be great if we could alleviate the urgency, but unfortunately that is not the reality,” he lamented.

Maria José Costa Díaz stressed that CHULC, which includes the hospitals of San José, Capuchos, Curry Cabral, Dona Estefania, Santa Marta and Maternidade Alfredo da Costa, will always try to provide the best answer to those who seek it.

“However, it is important for people to realize that this is a multi-purpose emergency, this is the ultimate emergency and serious situations must arise,” he stressed, adding that in less complex situations, the ideal course of action should be to see a family doctor and call SNS 24 (808 24 24 24).

The Santa Maria hospital also experienced “severe overload” over the weekend, said Luse João Gouveia, director of the Central Emergency Service at the Central Hospital University of Lisbon Norte.

“We had a significant increase of 34% in patients seen on Friday and almost 60% more on Saturday compared to the previous week,” with challenges mainly related to patient flow.

Like San Jose, Santa Maria Hospital also has patients waiting to be admitted. “In medicine and orthopedics alone, we currently have about 50 patients,” not counting patients in neurology, neurosurgery, surgery, etc., emphasized José Gouveia.

Santa Maria’s emergency department also receives “serious, more complex patients” who take longer to resolve and require hospitalization, as well as older patients without social support.

In addition, they have “a lot” of social cases: “We tried to keep some of these patients in the emergency department so as not to take up hospital beds for patients who need them for medical reasons.”

But, he added, “We also have patients who spent five or six days in the emergency department for social reasons and then had to be admitted to the hospital to try to better address the social problem.”

José Gouveia said that in order to obtain beds in the hospital, they are checking in different specialties to see if some patients can be discharged earlier and to find other solutions, such as hospitalization at home.

When asked about the overload of specialists, he said that they would continue to work, but admitted that it was difficult.

“It is essential that working conditions improve, that patients are referred, that hospitals operate as a network, that there are no ‘one-off’ closures of emergency departments or specialties, and that greater coordination is needed,” he said.