Sandra Ramos’ mother was admitted to the emergency room of the University Hospital of the Canary Islands (HUC), on the island of Tenerife, around 3 p.m. on Friday, October 11. The 65-year-old woman contacted this service on the recommendation of her family doctor. That same morning, the doctor had detected worrying transaminase values in the last blood test from his patient, who also showed signs of jaundice (yellowish skin). Suspecting that she might be suffering from liver damage, he decided to refer her immediately.
Ramos (36 years old) says that his mother spent more than three days in the emergency room “sitting on a chair” (the so-called clinical or geriatric chairs, with armrests, a slight inclination of the backrest and footrest) until last Monday. the night she was released, a bed was freed up in the obstetrics department and she could be transferred to the department.
Your case cannot be considered exceptional. The collapse of the service is structural. The photograph which illustrates this report was taken this week in these same emergency rooms, those of the reference hospital for the population of the north of Tenerife. A young man lies on three hard plastic chairs in a converted waiting room. At that time, he had been there for two days, with a fever and a route through which serum was being administered, according to sources consulted by this newspaper.
“We are all aware of the collapse of the health care system, but when we hear or read news about it, we swallow and pray that it does not affect us. Until it’s our turn. And at the end we say: how lucky to already have a room. We move on to the next state and forget everything we have experienced. “We have naturalized inhuman conditions,” deplores Ramos, who emphasizes that his complaint is addressed to those responsible and not to the health personnel who took care of his mother, who were “attentive, with good humor and good disposition even in chaos. .
The young woman says her mother had to wait until ten in the evening, about seven hours after entering the emergency room, to be evaluated by a doctor who ordered an ultrasound and tests. Before, around seven o’clock, we had taken his blood pressure.
The patient was placed in one of the spaces set up to try to unclog the emergency pit and stretcher area, as part of an emergency plan. “It was like a waiting room full of chairs with footrests. When I went there (relatives can make two visits a day, for one person and a maximum of fifteen minutes), there were about six or seven people, all close together, but one day my mother m ‘said they just added more. seats.”, remembers his daughter.
Sandra Ramos’ mother sat in that chair for over 80 hours because there were no free beds on the hospital floors. There he ate and “slept” when he could. He only got up to go to the bathroom and clean up. “She was very tired and could no longer move or walk,” because if she did, “it would interfere with the work of the staff,” says her daughter, who describes corridors filled with stretchers. “Not a soul could fit in. They were full. You had to stand to the side so the toilet could pass. The visitors were standing, stuck to the stretchers, they couldn’t even sit down. “It was horrible.”
No sunlight enters this room and patients, not only in this room, suffer from a lack of privacy. Sandra says there were lines to get into the bathroom and, even though everyone was wearing masks, they were stuck together in the room, “elbow to elbow.” Even if, for example in the case of his mother, it was suspected that the pathology could have a viral origin.
Ramos insists that the treatment of health personnel has been “correct at all times,” although he noted not only “fatigue” among workers, but also a certain boredom at having to endure this overload of work. “The patient ratio is too high for patients to receive quality care. It is necessary to improve their conditions because we also run the risk of them leaving their jobs. Above all, these are people who must take care of their mental health,” affirms this citizen, who regrets that sometimes health workers become “the target” towards which complaints are directed. “You have to complain, but you have to know to whom. We must aim high, look upwards because that is where the mismanagement and the root of the problem lie,” he concludes.
A structural collapse
Staff have been denouncing for years a structural collapse of the health and social system which is manifested in the emergency rooms of hospitals in the Canary Islands. A funnel is created because more patients are admitted than discharged. The front door is usually the emergency room. Corridors ceased to be transit zones and became work zones. And for some time now, and given this lack of space, other rooms have been gradually fitted out to try to alleviate this saturation. At the HUC, with geriatric seats or even waiting room chairs.
Meanwhile, ambulances remain stuck at the doors for hours (up to ten, according to union sources) because there are no more stretchers in the emergency room and they need those from these vehicles to be able to locate patients. With the added problem that this transport remains inoperative during this period to deal with other emergencies.
Workers speak of a combination of factors to explain the health collapse. The main one is the mismatch between resources and demand for care. With an increasingly aging population and more chronic multi-pathological patients, there is a shortage of staff, but also of space, with obsolete infrastructures which, in the case of HUCs, “were too small on the day they opened”, as Alejandro Gordillo, spokesperson for the Satse nurses union in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, recently said.
Added to this is another problem which goes beyond the strictly health domain and which continues not to be addressed despite the years which have passed since the first warning signs. This concerns the blocking of beds on hospital floors by patients who have already been discharged and require social and health care, but who cannot leave the hospital due to various circumstances. In some cases, because their loved ones give up due to lack of institutional support. In others, at least according to social work professionals, due to family abandonment. There are also cases of people without any family and community network to support them and who live alone. And above all because of the lack of places in residences to receive the social and health care they need.
Patricia Hernández, delegate of Intersindical Canaria (IC), highlighted last week that on the island of Tenerife alone there are 400 patients in this situation. “No local government has taken care of its elderly and aging population, who live in hospitals. This is very sad and it does not depend on the management of the hospital, but on the political will to solve this problem. And there isn’t one. And this does not exist because we have been denouncing for years while the population is aging and hospitalization units are filling up with patients who have been living in our hospitals for years,” he concludes.
