Since mid-September, the reproductive number R – which reflects how many more people infect one infected person on average – has dropped from 1.6 to about 1. Although the current increase in patients is about 10 to 14 days ago, has there been a declining trend in your hospital?
Fortunately, we now have a period of stagnation, when the number of hospitalized does not change fundamentally. It is the same as the number of occupied standard beds and intensive beds with lung ventilation, where there was a temporary significant increase, but we managed to transfer some patients to other hospitals, and so it stabilized again.
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So we are still on the same numbers, but they are also relatively high and we do not have large reserves.
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The number of missing health professionals is often mentioned as the biggest problem. What does your situation look like now?
Yes, the staff is the most important. We could have more beds ready, but the staff limits us. We currently have over two hundred people incapacitated for work, of which 150 are nurses, for example only 95 nurses are missing. These are highly qualified staff who are very difficult to replace, thus limiting ourselves to possible bed capacity. At present, we have about 25 vacancies.
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What does this mean for the situation in the next two weeks? What further development do you expect?
I don’t want to play science. We thought the increase would continue, but it hasn’t happened yet. Stagnation came in very handy and on time, but I can’t say what the reason is. I also do not know what is the reason for the declining R. Certainly worked government measures, but the question is which of them most.
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Are you preparing for situations where you would face an overload and have to decide who to connect to the lung ventilator and who not, as was the case in Italy?
Centrally, a certain instruction is being prepared, but we are still doing our best not to get into such a situation at all. So far, thanks to the help of nearby hospitals, we are doing well. On the other hand, if there are such rules, they must be comprehensive and, above all, uniform, they cannot be the rules of just one hospital, but of the entire health system.
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Due to the expected increase in the number of new cases, hospitals have canceled planned interventions since September. Are you already considering at least partially restoring them?
Certainly not. The planned procedures are not being done and I don’t think they will be done in our country for some time. If you want to secure covid patients, of whom we currently have 140, you must limit the rest of the traffic. And when you lack as many staff as we do, you need to regroup everything and what can be postponed, postponed so that you can use the staff for both covid patients and other acutely hospitalized patients, of whom we now have 170.
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So what all interventions did you have to postpone? If patients do not receive treatment now, is there a risk that their health will be far more compromised in the long run?
We have carefully selected operations that we can postpone and do not harm the patient’s health. On the other hand, it is true that their comfort may be impaired. So, for example, these are endoprostheses of the hip and knee joints, where the patient will not wait for the operation for half a year, but also for a year and a half. There is no health risk, but most of them are in pain and cannot move. So the discomfort will show.
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Do you also see a decrease in the number of those who come for preventive check-ups, for example after cancer?
We do not have an oncology inpatient department in Uherské Hradiště, but only an outpatient clinic, which I think everyone visits regularly. But there is an obvious decrease in other ambulances. For example, patients who have, for example, an acute long-term hearing loss, do not come for an examination now because they can postpone it. It would not make sense to deal with this problem right now.
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And then what are their reactions? According to the director of the Liberec Hospital, Richard Lukáš, doctors hear from the public that they are lying about the occupancy of hospitals and that the hospitals are empty. What is your experience?
I feel that they are understanding and we have not received any complaints yet. We are known to be in a region that is among the most affected. We sit here every day and struggle to provide staff for a total of 350 patients who are currently hospitalized with us.
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We have 130 volunteers and now another 40 high school students. But the problem is the medics who have chosen the hospitals where the university faculties are located. And unfortunately we don’t have medicine in the Zlín Region, so we didn’t get much.
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Experts have warned that hospitals may begin to collapse in the first half of November. You are now talking about stagnation. But apparently it is still not possible to say with certainty that we have avoided the worst?
Not yet. I really urge us not to make premature conclusions. The growth of positively tested patients has stopped for two days, and we are already happy … But everything has a run-up and last week there were increases of around 15,000 a day and they will not show up until some time, not immediately (The interview took place before Wednesday’s record increase of 15,729 infected people – ed. note.).
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As Professor Dušek (head of the Institute of Health Information and Statistics – ed. Note) said, these fortnight will show how the mentioned numbers will affect the occupancy of hospitals. So I’m afraid we won’t start cheering and it would start again with unchanged force. The forces are waning and the longer it is, the worse. So even if the numbers stagnate, I note that the exhaustion of hospitals like ours is really great.
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