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In Skåne, the number of intensive care patients has tripled in a period of ten days.
– We hope it will be an explosive process. Once patients start arriving, quite a few will arrive in no time and we don’t know where it will end up, says Björn Orrhede, an intensive care physician and iva section manager in Malmö.
The curves of the number of infected per day in Sweden continues to increase, and the number of covid patients in intensive care is also increasing. This spring, many regions opted to cancel planned operations to cope with increased pressure. According to the municipalities and regions of Sweden, this is a reduction of 20 percent.
But even if it could increase the rate of surgery, it would take more than two years to catch up, calculations by the Swedish perioperative registry, SPOR show.
In order not to further lengthen the service queues, several regions with which Ekot has been in contact want to continue carrying out the planned operations for as long as possible. However, due to the increased spread of the infection in society and an increased burden on medical care, several hospitals have started to cancel operations that are not urgent, for example, Södersjukhuset in Stockholm.
– It’s stressful. The number of people who apply to us and need to be admitted, both in hospital care and in intensive care, increases every day. Like last spring, we had to prioritize the types of operations that can be postponed, says Anne Kierkegaard, Södersjukhuset’s chief physician.
In the Malmö intensive care unit, intensive care physician Björn Orrhede is concerned about the growing number of covid patients who are now hospitalized. There, the health directorate wants to continue with the planned operations as long as possible, but Björn Orrhede believes that it is time to stop and cancel operations that are not urgent.
– I prefer to change too much, because we don’t know where it will end. I understand that it will affect other patient groups and I understand that it is a conflict of purpose. This is concerning, because we know there is a delay of a few weeks from when patients get sick until they actually get sick, says Björn Orrhede.
