Nowhere is Corona raging as devastatingly as in old people’s homes. As in the first wave, facilities with dozens of infected and deceased people are no longer uncommon. The competence of the staff is quickly questioned; the real reasons that homes would be death traps lie elsewhere. A comment by Paul Gerber
While the number of people infected with corona has climbed in the last few weeks, we have been able to read and hear the term triage in the media again and again. It describes the balancing decision that doctors have to make if, due to limited capacities, not all patients can be treated at the same time: Who is being treated? Who first Who has the highest chance of survival? For whom does the treatment offer little chance of success?
The term actually comes from the war or is used in serious traffic accidents. But even in the fight against the virus, individual hospitals come to points where they have to triage. Fortunately, so far only the doctors in the hardest hit regions have been confronted with this moral dilemma.
At the social level, however, triage has long been established. As in the first wave, the biggest conceivable corona catastrophe is that it spreads in a nursing home: dozens of members of the high-risk group who also rely on being cared for by a few overburdened carers.
In the first wave, a lawyer filed a lawsuit against the Hanns-Lilje-Heim in Wolfsburg and accused him of negligent hygiene deficiencies. 47 patients died there with corona and more than 40 nurses were infected.
In a 45 minute Documentary by ARD about the home, some of the almost unsolvable challenges that everyday nursing brings with it in the face of Corona are made clear. The procedure now also wants the Hire the responsible public prosecutor.
Among other things, the health department found “no unusual hygiene deficiencies” during controls. The judgment of the health department is telling. Hygiene deficiencies are common; a complete implementation of hygienic ideals in the face of serious staff shortages is simply impossible. This applies to hospitals – but often even more so to nursing homes.
Of course, it is wrong to blame the staff for these conditions. It is another variation of how the current crisis and pandemic is being dumped on the workers’ backs – morally too. In the first wave, the employees in the Wolfsburg home were photographed in their rare breaks while smoking to speculate about willful neglect of hygiene regulations. Something similar is happening today in Bavaria, for example.
In a nursing home in Zeil am Main, operated by Arbeiterwohlfart (AWO), 22 residents have died with corona since mid-November. The Bavarian health department then introduced additional controls. The responsible person is shown to the Süddeutsche Zeitung AWO division manager Ulrike Hahn outraged.
While the homes themselves have to cope with the quarantine of a large part of their staff, the state government is setting up a task force with 200 employees who are supposed to increasingly monitor compliance with hygiene regulations.
She now has to say to her employees: “There are now some coming to control your work, but you have to continue working twelve-hour shifts.” She hits the nail on the head: Hygiene regulations are not a question of will, but largely a matter of personnel – and resource issue.
It is also shortened to assign the blame for the many deaths to the only doctor who continued to work in Wolfsburg’s Hanns-Lilje-Heim in the spring, as happens in the ARD documentary. There he says that he himself decided not to push many patients to be hospitalized. Ethically questionable? Maybe. But what would the alternative have been?
47 dead in a home within a few weeks. Admitting all of them to Wolfsburg hospitals would have blown the intensive care capacities far. This situation currently prevails in many homes and cities in a more severe or less severe form.
For weeks now, the consequences of a health system that has been cut down have only been shrouded in a makeshift way by lying about nursing homes about “medical facilities” that are just as suitable as hospitals for treating Covid 19 infections. The triage started long ago.
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