Hospital recovery plans start
Scheduled operations are underway again, states regional health authority
Local health departments are rescheduling cancelled operations and appointments
LOCAL health departments around the Valencia region are rescheduling operations and appointments that had been cancelled.
The move comes as the number of admissions of Covid-19 patients to hospital wards has dropped sharply.
A spokesman for the regional health department noted that their intention is to ‘return to normality, depending on the evolution of the coronavirus pandemic’.
Figures show that 63.5% of beds in the region’s hospitals are now occupied compared with 74.32% on January 27.
And the number of patients with Covid-19 has plummeted – down from 58.47% of admissions at the end of January to 15.31% in the latest figures.
However, the percentage of patients with coronavirus being treated in intensive care units (ICU) still remains high, standing at 50.6% of the total on these wards.
Therefore the regional health department is opting to start on pending operations which do not require the patient to spend time recovering in ICU, unless they are urgent.
The return to 'normal'
The spokesman noted that local health departments have been told that ‘many of the resources dedicated to Covid-19’ can now be reassigned to ‘habitual services’.
“Since the start of the third wave of the pandemic all hospitals had activated their contingency plans and they took a series of measures to cover the need to treat these patients,” explained the spokesman.
Additional beds had been placed on wards; areas of hospitals had been ‘converted’ to take extra patients, including gymnasiums used for rehab; and surgery areas had been taken over.
“These zones are now been brought back into general use and almost all the surgery blocks in our hospitals have started to perform programmed operations again,” he said.
Priority operations which do not require a hospital stay are top of the list.
The spokesman added that they are also carrying out ‘programmed treatment which does require a hospital stay, including diagnostic tests’.
He added that although contact with doctors which does not require a physical meeting is being favoured, some appointments are now being given to residents.
This is being done in a ‘scaled fashion’ to prevent build ups of people in health centres and hospitals.