At home: “The hearse turns more and more” – hospital staff told us what was happening to them

“Visit to the gynecologist, no food, no bedding, no medications,” reads the message I read from a male patient in the Covid room of a designated hospital (although in the Covid room, women may also be better off with a doctor internal medicine or intensive care). Being a patient is not the daughter of Hungarian healthcare. Some, in turn, live their whole lives in it. Health workers report apocalyptic conditions. And the good is yet to come.

“There are terribly few of us who heal and terribly many and day by day there are more that we heal. Sometimes they have to bring in 5-6 people at a time, ”says a nurse who works in the Covid department of a county hospital designated as the first line of defense. “There are few experienced nurses and we are not well equipped. There is hardly a skin and sometimes it is not the most secure version either, just FFP-2. I have family members with chronic diseases at home, I just can’t do that to risk my life just for that, ”said a nurse who was afraid of her family members during our phone conversation. He also said that the masks are used alternately with each other and disinfected with a germicidal lamp when changing. This, in turn, is time consuming, the lamp takes a long time to disinfect.

So far they have had 28 patients per nurse, but that number is steadily deteriorating. There will be more transfers and class mergers because now there is hardly any space. He says there is also a shortage of specialists, three of whom are now working in shifts. He says it is shocking to see that more and more young patients, in their 30s and 35s but in their twenties, are receiving ventilation. It is also a difficult and risky task to treat patients who need other care in the Covid room: “A blood transfusion in the infection room is almost fatal. However, we have to do it because the patient needs it ”.

Professionals and doctors also try to nurture the soul because a large proportion of patients are very afraid of the complications of the disease and not least of loneliness. “I have been a nurse for 16 years, I have learned to communicate with patients. However, this is quite different now. They are very happy if they can at least exchange a few words with us, as they cannot see their relatives either. You have to pour souls into them. And each other. At first, we discovered that only stress and despair really went out at home, so now we prefer to stay at home for another half hour to talk after a shift and get what we have to do ”, describes our source the torture of the nurses .

According to an emergency nurse at a Budapest hospital, conditions are worse in Covid internal medicine and so-called intermediate wards than in intensive care units. There are coronavirus patients in Covid’s internal medicine wards who, although they need hospital treatment, are not so serious as to be placed on an intensive ventilator adj’isten. In the intermediate classes, there are those who, although they produce symptoms suggestive of coronavirus, need other care, but have not yet been evaluated. “That’s why it would be incredibly important to have rapid tests in hospitals, because that way we waste a lot of time unnecessarily,” he said.

A chief doctor in charge of a rural hospital, on the other hand, said they have rapid tests and use them. The problem at your institution is not with the amount or lack of evidence, but with the staggering mass of patients presented by infected or suspected Covid patients. “At first I thought he had a problem with me because for the past few days I had somehow always caught up with the hearse in front of me. Then I realized that sadly I am not in the wrong place all the time, I am spinning many times. With us, 6 to 8 patients a day die only in the Covid wards. In addition, there are those who are not in the intensive care unit, but in Covid’s internal medicine department, “he added.

His hospital is at the forefront of defense and his Covid department is already running at 90 percent occupancy. However, due to Covid, several classes have already moved, more of them are “co-renting” with each other, in much smaller rooms than before and little by little they will have nowhere to go. And he won’t be with anyone either, because several of the doctors and nurses were also infected. “We are also looking for volunteers to come to the class to distribute food, for example, but we are even waiting for people for administrative jobs, there is such a shortage,” said the doctor.

According to a doctor working in the emergency department of the Covid Hospital in Budapest, elective interventions, that is, not life-saving or urgent, should have been stopped a long time ago, because they put extreme pressure on the system (previously requested by the chamber doctor, and Minister Gergely Gulyás spoke on Wednesday about it). “There are an astonishing number of patients. Also, many people who come to completely different care will only have a positive test, only the mandatory test shows that they are infected, ”he says. There is so much space that last week a patient from Pest had to be transferred to a rural hospital 80 kilometers from the capital.

“They take 8 to 10 dead a day and many remain inside us for 3 to 4 weeks. Because we fight for them. If we did not, the course of the infection would be shorter and the deaths would be more ”, he adds bitterly. Among the covid patients who need hospital care, there are many elderly people who are already seriously ill, at least among their own.

He also has reservations about tools: “We have everything and everything is Chinese. It seems that the quantity was more important. Gloves, for example, are horrible, almost useless. But a mask is enough, ”describes a doctor who works in one of the capital’s key hospitals.

Although Gergely Gulyás was proud to announce in mid-October that the salaries of nurses working in the extremely difficult conditions mentioned in the article would increase from November, he forgot to add that it was a multi-stage agreement that was known before the outbreak. However, several of our sources have mentioned that healthcare workers infected with the coronavirus receive only 60 percent during their illness rather than 100 percent of sick pay under regulation. After all, prove to anyone that you contracted the infection in the course of your work and not elsewhere or due to your own inattention.

Emmi answered our question that, just like during the first spring wave, healthcare workers who become infected while performing their duties now receive 100 percent sick pay, following the proper procedure. In possession of a positive laboratory result, at the initiative of the institution, the office of the government of the capital city or the county responsible for the employer’s facilities, as the occupational safety authority, may establish that the health worker has encountered a person infected with the Covid-19 virus. The full amount is paid to the worker in two installments: first 60% of the sick pay and then the remaining 40% at the end of the occupational disease procedure.

According to Tamásné Babonits, vice president general of the Hungarian Chamber of Health Professionals, even if the remaining 40 percent is paid, the review will take a long time. “There is a colleague who has just received the remaining 40 percent of his salary due to his spring illness. This is an incredibly large cut in the salary of a health professional, ”recalls the vice president of the chamber.

Therefore, anyone who has recently become infected as a nurse while living a human life has to give up Christmas gifts. It would be time, let’s say, not to buy anyway, as the numbers show that front-line hospitals are slowly filling up and making the list of the next institutions. With more patients, less hospital staff and more exhausted.

The photos in this article are illustrations.