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The white containers where the emergency room dedicated to covid-19 of the largest hospital in the country operates are installed in front of the Emergency Center and separated from the main building to guarantee the safety of other patients who are going to perform their treatments, consultations there and surgeries. The new wing was created recently after the first phase of the pandemic, concentrating the services that until then provided the Red Cross tents, the space in the central reception of the hospital and a prefabricated one. The intention was to “separate suspicious patients from non-suspects by creating separate circuits,” Dr. Jacques Santos, deputy director of the Emergency Service, tells Lusa.
When asked if the influx of patients with covid-19 or suspected of being infected has increased, the doctor says that “it has been increasing day by day.” “We have capacity for 26 patients and, at this time, the capacity is almost full in the community, although they are sick waiting to be transferred to services,” he explains.
The movement is visible at the door of urgency. The day of the Lusa report in Santa María, held on Tuesday. There are INEM ambulances parked, health professionals equipped with protective suits and a few dozen people waiting to take the covid-19 test: some are sitting on the pillars that flank the sidewalk, while others prefer to stand in their turn.
Inside, health professionals are deployed in the screening area, where they perform swabs, and circulate through the different individual boxes, where the most serious patients are, lying on stretchers waiting to be transferred to other services. In this service, there are ventilators, a resuscitation room and all the necessary medicines and machines to attend to the most urgent cases.
“We are admitting many patients to intensive care”, says Jacques Santos, recalling that at the beginning of the second wave there seemed to be less serious patients, because the infected population was younger, but “it was a mistake to believe that.” “In the midst of so many new patients, it seems that the virus is being less aggressive,” but “the severity of the patients is not less,” he observes.
Every day, between 100 and 150 users go through the emergency room, according to the president of the Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte, Daniel Ferro, considering that having the emergency room separately helps, because it avoids “maximum contact” with the institution , which monitors two-thirds. who resorted to urgency and were sent home, but may still have symptoms.
Despite the long months of the pandemic and the weariness expressed on the faces of many health professionals, the desire to help remains. “In terms of nursing, we have maintained the same profile from March until today,” Carlos Neto, nurse manager of the Emergency Services, who has been fighting the pandemic from day one, told Lusa. For the nurse, the greatest difficulties are “in the pressure of insecurity” that professionals have and “in the uncertainty about the future”, due to the “prolongation of this situation”, which “is noticeable in the whole team” .
“But we do not lower our guard”, guarantees Carlos Neto, considering that the greatest challenge that professionals must face is maintaining “security profiles, avoiding the contingency of material and human resources difficulties and providing the assistance that is necessary”. . It is a situation that requires “a lot of effort” and although the professionals are not yet exhausted, all this “is leaving some marks for the temporary extension of the pandemic and certainly for what will come, because it will take a few months.”
For Dr. Jacques Santos, the problem is that the professionals did not have a period in which they were “absent from the infection.” Making a comparison with influenza A, the doctor says that there it was known that there was a “long period” of calm (spring, summer and autumn), which did not happen with this virus. Alone in confinement, but there was not enough time to recover, and at that time there were many health professionals infected or in quarantine and this made it difficult to “fully enjoy the holidays.”
