Volunteers are unable to provide support to patients admitted to most of the country’s hospitals as they were before the pandemic, and their activities are now limited to external consultations, the National Federation of Health Volunteers (FNVS) said.
In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic drove volunteers away from hospitals, who had hoped to return when restrictions were lifted, but this has not yet happened.
In most hospitals, volunteers cannot be present in either the inpatient setting or the emergency department, where they previously provided care to patients as well as specialists, FNVS President Carlos Pinto Correia told Lusa.
“Hospitals are reluctant to allow volunteers to return for hospitalization,” lamented Carlos Pinto Correia, explaining that they were the ones who supported patients by bringing them “magazines, newspapers and conversations, because a large part of them do not have visitors.” or family members, and this work is done by a volunteer.”
What health workers lacked in time was often made up for by volunteers who could calmly answer questions patients wanted to ask specialists, he said.
“This work is not being carried out at the moment. There are some exceptions, this is a fact, but the majority did not allow us to return to hospitalization,” he emphasized.
Authorization for volunteers to return must be given by the infection control and antimicrobial resistance committees, but teams are “slow to give this permission, and the administration [hospitalares] help yourself with this.”
Carlos Pinto Correia said that the federation has already contacted hospital administrations “several times” but the processes remain at a standstill, expressing regret that he has not yet received any response from the Ministry of Health or the General Directorate of Health to requests for volunteers to participate in program. expand your activities.
In a conversation with Lusa, the executive directorate of SNS assured that they had not given any instructions prohibiting volunteers from going to hospitals.
At the moment, the volunteers’ activities are concentrated in the field of external consulting, where they do not depend on anyone other than the hospital’s operating rules.
There, they can independently talk to patients, offer hot drinks, help them use technology to obtain appointment tickets, and even guide them through the “hospital maze.”
Carlos Pinto Correia believes that volunteers are needed to help the most fragile patients, especially elderly patients or patients with dementia who may end up getting lost or even leaving health services alone.
“We could help if we were there, talking to patients, because if they leave, it’s because they feel abandoned. They think: they don’t help me, they don’t talk to me, they don’t answer me. That’s why I’m not here to do anything, I’m leaving,” he emphasized.
With volunteers in the hospitals, he argued, “these patients are likely to have more company and will not have that sense of escape which attacks their spirit and which they often achieve.”
This idea is supported by Ines (not her real name), who last September did not hear from her mother for more than 48 hours after she was admitted to the emergency department of a hospital in Coimbra.
Inez said that despite being told by the health facility that her mother had Alzheimer’s disease, follow-up was prevented. Two days later, the woman was handed over to her family “naked, dirty, barefoot, covered with a robe and sitting in a wheelchair.”
Ines told Luca that she believed “if there were still volunteers at the hospital, the story would probably be different.”