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We must not allow a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh swords. It is true that until vaccination begins the risks will not decrease, let’s not think that we have herd immunity, because there are many examples of people who are infected a second time. We cannot do without the masks until we are sure that we have some kind of herd immunity, we must not allow relaxation.
With these words, but also that we must still be careful, says prof. Dr. Radmilo Jankovic, deputy director of the Nis Clinical Center and director of the Anesthesia and Intensive Care Clinic. It was his team in Nis, but also colleagues in their field of expertise, who bore the great burden of this epidemic.
– Be careful, regardless of high hopes. Immunization is what is somehow most encouraging in all this, but we cannot expect our lives to be the same until at least the summer – he adds.
What have doctors and medical personnel survived this year, how much will everything that happened have on them?
– All this was equally difficult for health workers as for the population. Health workers, as ordinary citizens, went through the same difficulties that kovid brought, and at the same time in the red zones they faced the risk of the unknown, in terms of treatment and treatment, the fear of failure, the possibility to catch it. They were less afraid for their own and more for the health of their families because they had to go home, or they stayed apart so as not to carry the infection there. What is not yet seen are the effects of a terrible psychological burden. They are still on adrenaline, under positive stress, motivated and directed towards treatment and not getting infected, but when all of that happens and the stress hormones drop, it will show how devastating it has been for them. This cumulative stress will only show its effect and in the end the physical effort that is enormous mainly for people in red areas, but also for those who stayed in green areas and who took over much of the work due to lack of supply, this physical effort is not negligible.
Were large numbers of healthcare workers infected during the epidemic?
– More than half of them were infected outside the hospitals in their family and social environment, because they are also ordinary citizens. From my clinic, which bore the heaviest burden in KC, 34 doctors were infected, three of them for the second time, once in March, once now. There are doctors who were infected in the July wave, so now some of them had serious clinical pictures. Our oldest doctor, the head of intensive care, Dr. Dragisa Ljubenović, spent seven days in the intensive care unit and we almost lost him. Many colleagues lay here. And the consequences after kovid are not negligible.
Has this great crisis strengthened our health system? In which segments are we strongest now?
– We are stronger first for an unsurpassed experience. The Serbian healthcare system has proven to be very flexible and resilient, adapting very quickly to the influx of large numbers of patients. We had about 500 patients a day throughout Serbia. This epidemic has shown us that more intensive care beds are needed in the future. I would not rule out the possibility of such a massive phenomenon happening again in the world. We need hospitals like the ones in Batajnica and Krusevac, with a lot of intensive care beds, and I think investments will be made in that direction in the coming years. The kovida 19 epidemic also pointed to the lack of anesthesiologists, as in all parts of Europe, the only doctors certified to deal with mechanical ventilation and intensive treatment. It is completely clear that the state must guide young doctors towards this specialization. And the third thing we learned – is the prevention that we forget about until this happened. Neither anesthesiologists nor intensive care unit nurses can win the fight against kovid 19, because that’s the end of that fight. The battle was won through prevention. The lesson we have learned is that we must never again face 9,000 infected people a day and we must never again put ourselves in the situation of having 10,000 hospitalized with a severe clinical picture.
To what extent did the fact that we had a new clinical center in Nis contribute?
– If Nis hadn’t had a new KC in the Kovid epidemic, it would have been terrible. At one point, after the epidemic broke out at the Gerontology Center in Nis and a couple of private gerontological centers, we had as many as 980 patients. The new KC Nis building remains the most modern hospital in Serbia and the second largest health institution in terms of number of beds. The functionality of the building and the fact that it has all the diagnoses in one place made it possible to serve patients much more efficiently. We have 700 beds in this building, next to each one has a central oxygen supply and no other health institution in Serbia.
To what extent has the existence of such an institution increased the health capacities not only of Nis, but also of Serbia?
– We hospitalized more than 9,500 patients, more than a quarter of the capacity of the hospital in Serbia. In intensive care for nine months, we cared for almost 1,400 patients suffering from covid, mainly in Serbia. The most difficult patients come here, we currently have them from Paracin, Kraljevo, Novi Pazar, Kladovo, Presevo, Gjilan, Gracanica, Kosovska Mitrovica … If it weren’t for the new KC Nis, the logistics would be much more difficult, the patients would be In different buildings, road movements would make infection of personnel much more likely, since most of the buildings of the old KC have one or possibly two elevators. In the new building, the roads are defined and do not cross, you have 18 elevators, so the possibility of infecting people is much lower. The quality of the treatment is of a very high level due to the equipment we receive. We do not have to take patients out of the hospital, here are X-rays and laboratory diagnoses, all specialists are in one place. Everything contributed to the greater success of the treatment. While there was no space in almost every other hospital, we always had spare beds and the option to quickly empty a floor and adapt it for kovid patients. And it certainly made the quality of survival treatment much higher than in other parts of Serbia.
I dedicate the medal to my father
You have been awarded the Star of the Order of Karadjordj and the City of Leskovac award, to whom do you dedicate the medal?
– The medal of the city of Leskovac is an emotionally great moment for me and a bit difficult because I got it from the city where I was born and to which I am attached. Somehow, I dedicated that medal to my father, who passed away from the crown. After that, the highest recognition that a doctor, scientist, health worker can receive, the highest recognition for an individual from Serbia – Karadjordjev’s third-degree star. It came as the crown of everything we did. I can be a laureate of that, but behind that is the work, the courage, the dedication of an entire army of people, my anesthesiologists who worked in intensive care units and who gave the best of themselves. I like to say that I was the commander of a persistent army that did not yield when many knelt. I dedicate the Karadjordj star to all the “Hospital Hero” healthcare workers, and that is KC Nis, who individually received the highest number of patients and made the highest sacrifice, but also to all the kovid hospital workers around the world. system of southeastern Serbia.
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