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Many clinics are overloaded due to Corona. The director of a hospital in Saxony now admits that the doctors at his home have had to make a difficult decision several times: Whe is treated and who is not.
For the first time, a medical director says publicly that his clinic doctors have to decide which patients to help and which not. Dr. Mathias Mengel, medical director of Klinikum Oberlausitzer Bergland gGmbH, explained in a video forum Tuesday night that the Zittau hospital had to sort multiple times. According to him, there were not enough ventilation beds available. The technical term triage comes from the French verb “trier”, which means “to order” or “to choose”.
“In recent days we have been in the situation several times where we had to decide who receives oxygen and who does not,” Mengel confirmed to t-online. Mengel said a small team would make decisions on short notice. Attempts are being made to transfer the unattended patient to another clinic. “But we are in the epic, and all West Saxony is full, some houses do not even occupy.” The decision could also mean that there would no longer be any adequate help for a patient who could not be relocated, and that was also the case. First, Deutschlandfunk reporter Alexander Moritz reported on Mengel’s account.
There is no explicit legal regulation for triage
There is no triage law in Germany. Therefore, the law does not explicitly regulate how doctors must decide about life or death in emergency situations. Seven medical societies, including the DIVI Society of Intensive Care Physicians, developed appropriate recommendations for action for triage in Corona times in March. They are intended to help treating physicians make difficult decisions.
The recommendations for action say, for example: “The prioritization of patients must, therefore, be based on the criterion of the prospects of clinical success, which does not mean a decision in the sense of ‘best option’, but the renunciation treatment for those who have none or very few there is little chance of success. “
In the Görlitz district, to which Zittau belongs, the seven-day incidence is 645 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the district, 263 corona patients were treated as inpatients at Görlitz district clinics, 25 of them in intensive care (as of Tuesday noon). So far, 262 corona patients have died in the district.
On Tuesday, the health department reported 14 new deaths. Eight of the dead were over 80 years old, but a 53-year-old woman and a 43-year-old man also died Tuesday.
* At this point we have made it clearer that according to the Medical Director this case has already occurred.
