Doctor pens lengthy post about the actual hospital situation
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“Dear civil society, dear political elite, dear colleagues,” begins Dr Nóra Máté-Horváth her post about the realities of working in the intensive care unit, how there are fewer than 2,000 trained specialists for 10,000 available hospital beds, and there are 16,000 ventilators.
As the second wave of the pandemic rips through Hungary more severely than the first one did, many are criticising and attacking healthcare professionals, who are working tirelessly to take care of the growing number of patients, Szeretlek Magyarorszag reported. Now, an intensive care specialist, Dr Nóra Máté-Horváth, has reached out to the public, asking them to please be more understanding of the situations hospitals have to deal with.
“I ask you all to focus on cooperation, thinking together, and finding solutions during a pandemic, not on disintegration, reprimanding each other, political tossing, and number warfare,” Dr Máté-Horváth writes in her Facebook post.
She details show just how afraid herself and her fellow doctors and nurses are as they see the number of confirmed cases rise each day and as the number of suspected patients keeps increasing as well. How they have to tell their patients to put on the mask, and how they need to tell family members that, sorry, they cannot let them in for a visit. “Conflicts between patient and doctor, doctor and doctor, doctor and maintainer, maintainer and decision-maker are common – tensions are noticeably high.”
“What is in the hospitals? As I wrote above: worry and anticipation. Generally, hospitals currently have protective equipment, ventilators, a cautiously developed local COVID-19 care protocol that has been routinely practised over the past six months, brave, hard-working colleagues who follow the international literature, and a growing psychological readiness. However, there is also a degree of clairvoyance that we are missing from every decision-making manifestation: we see realistically what the system is capable of.
“Unfortunately, the fact that no one is left unattended and that ‘hospital capacities have almost unlimited availability’ is not true at all. We know that when it comes to the number of intensive care patients that the Hungarian healthcare can provide for is limited not by the number of free beds, and certainly not by the number of ventilators.”
After seeing the damage the pandemic has done to countries such as the United States, Spain, or France, it is understandable why the government would want to stock up on ventilators; however, the majority of the 16,000 ventilators acquired will not help save lives when there are not enough doctors specifically trained to take care of the patients on the ventilators. Dr Máté-Horváth suggests we not dwell on the number of ventilators as it is “no longer the limiting factor”.
What a coronavirus-infected patient needs is to be “accompanied by appropriate intensive care unit staff 24 hours a day: an anesthesiologist, an intensive care physician, and an intensive care specialist nurse. And even then, the chances of recovery are modest.”
According to Dr Máté-Horváth, the biggest problem throughout this pandemic is the low number of intensive care nurses. “We are talking about a very special area of being a nurse, one that they have learned for years and practised for a long time after their studies. They can care for a ventilated patient, set up a ventilator at a basic level, replace vital drug pumps with lightning speed, catheterise, puncture an artery, operate a central venous cannula, place a heart monitor, and wind complicated cables in the correct order to the patient. They see if a patient is deteriorating, they see if there is trouble, and they jump and act. They are a very special team.”