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The São João Hospital, in Porto, has reached the limit of its capacity to respond to patients who need the ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) life support technique. Contacted by the Observer, the coordinator of the ECMO São João Reference Center, Roberto Roncon, confirms that the hospital has had “More references” for this technique “than responsiveness”.
At the moment, the Hospital has the capacity to have 15 patients on ECMO; currently, of these 15, 11 are patients with Covid. Roberto Roncon explains that there were “a significant number of patients who were referred from hospitals in the north of the country” and that they could not respond. How many? “About five or six.” Responsiveness depends not only on equipment availability, but also on the number of Covid vacancies.
However, after contacting the Observer by the person in charge of S. João, the Lusa agency confirmed that on Friday the The Hospital de S. José received four patients from the hospitals of Peñafiel, Pedro Hispano, in Matosinhos, and Bragança and this Saturday he received a patient from the Guimarães Hospital.
The São João Hospital Center is the only hospital in the north of the country with the means to receive patients who need the ECMO life support technique. When the hospital cannot meet the requests of other hospitals in the north of the country, the medical teams responsible for the patients are advised to contact other centers capable of receiving patients and applying the technique, such as Hospital de Santa María and the São José Hospital, both in Lisbon.
Critical patient from the north transferred to Lisbon due to lack of beds in the ECMO service of the São João Hospital
“If these hospitals have a vacancy, the patient can be transferred to their unit. The opposite has also happened: we have already searched for patients in Lisbon, the Azores and Coimbra. It is not an unusual procedure “, explains Roberto Roncon, exemplifying that, on Friday, a non-Covid patient from the Penafiel hospital was” rescued “” with a severe form of pneumonia. “
In November, the Observer had already reported that a Covid-19 patient under the age of 60, who needed ECMO, had been transferred to Lisbon because there were not enough beds in São João. At the time, Roberto Roncon said that the capacity in the hospital “is very variable.” In an interview with Lusa, the official had also admitted that it would be an “illusion” to think that it is possible to respond to all requests. “Say that it is easy and that we will respond to all requests is to tell the story of the old women. We are in a pandemic context ”, he defended.
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ECMO is an extracorporeal life support technique that is used in critically ill patients with heart or lung failure and that, in practice, replaces the heart and lungs. As the Observer wrote, the technique, on the one hand, helps the patient breathe, reduces the risk of lung injury, supports the circulatory system, and decreases the chances of cardiac sequelae, but, on the other hand, it can cause bleeding.
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