Home » News » Some hospitals have too few nurses for a new revival of the corona virus

Some hospitals have too few nurses for a new revival of the corona virus

Contrary to what was intended, the hospitals do not seem to succeed in receiving corona patients while sparing regular care. That is the picture after a tour of the NOS along hospitals and acute care regions. The personnel problem has not yet been resolved.

“We had hoped that, to put it disrespectfully, we could open a can of nurses, but adding up is more difficult than we thought”, says Diederik Gommers, president of the IC doctors association and who works at Erasmus MC.

The hospitals are better prepared because they have experience with the virus, but are now overwhelmed by the speed with which it is approaching them. “We didn’t think it would have to be that fast,” says Gommers. “Regular care is already cracking and squeaking, and then winter has yet to come.”

Shorter downtime

This week it became clear that regular care in the Amsterdam region is under pressure due to the increased number of corona patients. And planned operations have already been postponed in the Leiden University Medical Center.

“You can scale up to a certain extent by deploying staff in a smart way, but at some point it will stop,” says the LUMC. The acute care region here had already scaled up, but when the number of corona patients increased, it was nevertheless disappointing.

Amsterdam UMC is facing the same problem. “Very nice, those plans of the cabinet, but we will not achieve them in the short term,” said a spokesman. “We hope that it will be a different wave than the first, that fewer people will end up in the ICU and have a shorter lying time. But we are not sure.” As expected, the shortage of nurses will not be resolved in the summer.

Left or right

According to Ernst Kuipers of the National Network Acute Care (LNAZ), the national IC capacity has been scaled up as agreed, and it will be possible to receive the corona patients “left or right”. “But it is quite a challenge for all hospitals and then you quickly come to scaling up regular care.”

He mainly sees a problem in the wards outside the IC. “We don’t need those IC beds today or tomorrow.” But there are more than 400 corona patients in the ordinary nursing wards, and that is already more than expected for this time of the year. “The numbers in the clinics are rising to such an extent that regular care is being jeopardized. If it continues to increase, we will have to scale down regular care in the coming week.”

Ambitious plans

The intention was precisely to prevent regular care from being displaced as much as possible, Minister De Jonge wrote on 30 June during the presentation of the so-called upscaling plan. The first phase of the expansion plans had to be completed by 1 October, but that is only partially successful. Hospital admissions have been on the rise for about a week and regular care is already under pressure.

Hospitals had to realize 200 extra intensive care beds and 400 hospital beds outside the ICU in the short term to accommodate a second revival of the corona virus, without scaling down regular care again. The plan already stated that it is very ambitious to have 1,350 IC beds structurally available by the autumn.

Dire personnel problem

An IC nurse training takes 18 months, so it was already clear that it would not work. But hopes were pinned, for example, on the recall of former ICU nurses or the extension of contractures for existing nurses. That did not work. The personnel problem is also more acute because nurses are at home with infections or are in quarantine because family members are infected.

The regions where relatively few corona patients are in hospitals, such as Brabant, Limburg and Groningen, say that they have the plans ready. But there too it remains to be seen whether this is not at the expense of regular care.

The UMC in Utrecht has created a ‘flexible shell’ on paper with nurses from the medium care, the IC for children and the OR. “That will not be at the expense of regular care, unless, for example, it coincides with the RS virus, in which case the nurses for children will be needed in their own ward,” says a spokesman.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.