Bearing witness to a pandemic BUPA | SANITAS
Always a nurse, with or without a pandemic mª francisca castillo Nurse IntegraMédica Outpatients Clinics
I am 32 years old and have been a nurse for eight years. Our centre is the biggest of all of them and I don’t think we were prepared for this pandemic. What we had to do, most of all, was to make sure the patients got quality, safe care. In February, we started talking about how we could prepare for this. In the third or fourth week the first Covid cases started coming in. In March it became an avalanche and one suspected case became fifteen to twenty a day. March was a really bad month. I was on the verge of tears on many occasions. That month was a mixture of people coming in for pcr tests and appointments for patients with chronic illnesses - high blood pressure, diabetics, etc. In March and April, we started to receive protocols from the Ministry of Health with guidelines on how to deal with the pandemic within the different procedures and areas of the medical centre. In April we started to get it all organised. Over time, we were able to fine-tune it.
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