“Hungarian doctors are like pilots who have to find the runway without beacon-lights”
In the spring, war conditions broke out in British healthcare due to the epidemic, but open data management managed to help settle the questions. Out of the 62,000 victims, 46,000 died during the first wave. Therefore, it is a huge problem that the detailed statistics are kept secret in Hungary, two intensive care specialists working in Great Britain, Tamás Leiner and Tamás Szakmány, told VálaszOnline.
At Leiner’s Hospital, for example, every employee receives an email every day stating how many patients have contracted the infection at that hospital. They know exactly what the mortality rate is and where among invasively ventilated patients, writes 444.
According to Szakmány, it would be good if the staff of hospitals could know the quality of care, the number of beds, nurses, and ventilators compared to other institutions. This would make it easier to decide if a method they use was really working or if they are doing something better somewhere else.
“Without it, colleagues in Hungary are like a pilot who has to find the runway without beacon-lights. You may get lucky, but in intensive care, it is worth minimising the luck factor.”
No one in Hungary knows what percentage of infected patients in the intensive care unit or on ventilation die, let alone broken down according to hospitals nationwide. The Health Professional College, established by the Ministry of Human Resources, sent a special call to prevent intensive care physicians from providing data to anyone outside the government.
Therefore, Hungarians can only rely on one story at a time, for example, that according to János Szlávik, the chief physician of the South Pest Central Hospital, the mortality rate among ventilated patients in their own ward is 40-45 per cent. Or on an interview with paediatrician Hunor Novák which he did with a professor working in intensive care asking for anonymity. He said that
he knows of a hospital where, so far, every Covid-19 patient on a ventilator in the intensive care unit has died, but at best he has only heard of a 22 per cent survival rate.
He claims these data come from large universities and counties, but even if we accept it, they cannot be generalised.
Based on his information from Hungary, Tamás Szakmány can imagine that these numbers are true. The main cause of high mortality is the lack of nurses, but it also plays a role whether hopeless cases are admitted to the intensive care unit or only those who are thought to be able to be saved. The former is true for Hungary, while the latter is true for Great Britain, so if we knew the mortality rate at home, it would not be comparable to the mortality rate there.
When the press asked the National Centre for Public Health for data broken down according to hospitals, they claimed they were unaware of it. Ákos Hadházy, an independent representative, also had no luck with the Ministry of Human Resources, the National Health Insurance Fund Manager, and the Ministry of the Interior.
In Hungary, it is not even reported daily how many infected patients are in the invasive care unit.
In comparison, Minister Gergely Gulyás said in November, “from the very beginning, the government considered it important to collect thorough, honest data on a daily basis. Overall, I think we can proudly say that the Hungarian data reporting system is one of the most up-to-date compared to the reporting systems of other European countries.”
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Source: 444.hu