The patients transferred from the hospital divino Espirito Santo in Ponta Delgada in Madeira remain in the hospital of Dr. Neliu Mendonça and in the 3rd Garrison Regiment (RG) and they are all “stable”, he said this Monday: fair of sources in hospitals .
Fifty-five patients from the Azores (fewer than the more than six dozen originally expected) arrived around “2:30 a.m. at the airport and were transferred to the hospital and military zone RG3” in Funchal, clinical director of the Dr. Nelio Mendonça Hospital Julio Nobrega told reporters.
A fire that broke out at the Divino Espirito Santo Hospital in Ponta Delgada on Saturday at 9:40 a.m. local time (10:40 a.m. in Lisbon) forced the transfer of all hospitalized patients.
“We offered our services and were asked to accept 57 patients, but the number varied throughout the day. In practice, we admitted 55 patients. Some of them were hospitalized and had to stay [no hospital]23, and the remaining 32 were in RG3,” said the clinical director.
According to Julio Nobrega, “the largest group of patients with chronic renal failure” requiring hemodialysis treatment, which had become unavailable in the Azores, was housed in RG3.
“Of those who were in the barracks, 21 patients are already on hemodialysis, their condition is stable and very grateful,” he explained.
The person in charge also recalled that three patients had already arrived in the Madeira region on Sunday: two high-risk pregnant women admitted to the obstetrics department and a patient who was in intensive care and is now in the same department at the Dr. Nelio Mendonça Hospital.
Julio Nóbrega said he still did not know how long patients would have to stay in the region as the situation depended on the “recovery and resumption of activities” at the largest hospital in the Azores, but assured that the Madeira hospital would provide full cooperation “as long as necessary.”
On Sunday, the Azores government declared a public disaster due to a fire at the Ponta Delgada hospital on the island of São Miguel, with regional Health and Social Welfare Secretary Monica Seydi saying the facility had already undergone two inspections with no forecast for normal operations to resume no equipment yet.
According to the head of the Azores health authority, at the time of the fire there were 333 patients in the medical facility and 240 people needed to be transferred.
The most critical and serious patients were transferred to the CUF hospital in Lagoa, while the rest were transferred to medical centers.
In addition to the Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo, there are two other hospitals in the Azores, on the islands of Terceira (in Angra do Heroísmo) and Faial (in Horta), to which more than 50 patients were transferred.