Despair, rage and helplessness. These are some of the feelings that characterized the staff of Madrid residences, the elderly themselves and their loved ones during the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020, as evidenced by transcripts of 112 calls made by retirement home employees and family members to which you had access ‘elDiario.es’.
With the arrival of the pandemic, The Community of Madrid led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso approved a protocol to restrict transfers of residents to hospitals. A decision that sowed chaos in Madrid’s retirement homes, overwhelmed and without the help of the Madrid Health Service.
“I called several times this morning because They die like bedbugs. There’s no staff, they can’t cope. Please leave now because you will find 180 elderly people dead. The residence tells us that no one is calling them and that they are not giving them equipment,” warned the daughter of a user of a residence in Sanchinarro after several calls to 112, a few days after the onset of the condition. alarm.
Like this one, “elDiario.es” had access to around sixty heartbreaking calls during the first month of the pandemic in 2020, where workers and members of their families turned to 112 looking for help. help that didn’t arrive…and they knew the reason. .
“The doctor told me that my mother was very unwell. They told us that they were not referring her because they had an order, a protocol not to refer her to hospitals.“, confessed the son of a user of a residence in Valdemoro, alerted by the poor condition of his mother. Calling 112 was the solution that the doctor suggested to the family member to try to get an ambulance which did not arrive at the request of the residence, whose response from the teleoperator was to notify the notice again.
And therefore dozens of calls. “I couldn’t speak to him for several days. Today I did and he asked me to call for help. He says he is not isolated, that he is not even given food, that he has not had dinner. No matter how much he screams, no one cares for him. »said the friend of a resident of a center in Torrelodones.
Some of them, with broken voices, like the daughter of a user of a center in Robledo de Chavela, who communicates the critical situation of her father, aged 83. “He has breathing problems and they told us that neither an ambulance nor anyone was going,” the doctor told me. “Are they going to let him die? It’s one thing for them to die and another thing for them to die suffering.. “My father paid into Social Security, doesn’t he have the right to die with dignity?”
“Only the funeral home came. You know that geriatric patients are not transferred,” a doctor from one of the residences explained to 112, specifying that five residents had died the same day.
In all, 7,690 elderly people died in two months in nursing homes for elderly people in the Community of Madrid who do not benefit from hospital care. 18% of all registered residents in Madrid, or almost one in five elderly people, died in a residence.
To this must be added the lack of reinforcements in the centers, despite the fact that part of the staff has also been infected, and also the lack of material reinforcement in a more than critical situation. “The referrals were made according to clinical criteria established by the liaison geriatricians and were approved by the Spanish Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology”, Madrid government sources tell ‘elDiario.es’, denying the existence of ‘a protocol.
