Things you never forget

People were anxious when they called

alejandra llorente Projects and Innovation Sanitas Healthcare Funding

At the beginning, it was very difficult, because in the 24 hour telephone support service we usually took a maximum of a thousand calls a day, but now we were taking up to about 4,500. We all had to answer them, no matter what our role, because it was important not to let our health centre collapse.

In the middle of the pandemic we were able to help people by phone thanks to our digital health programmes. We have been working with these systems for ten years. We also have video calls too and soon we hope to offer our health programmes digitally, through an app .

In the health promotion service we give support using an online platform with a team of health professionals made up of doctors, nurses, nutritionists and psychologists. We all use phone, video and chat to talk to our customers. We also have a 24-hour service to manage potential emergencies, sending ambulances or staff to peoples’ homes - doctors, nurses and even oxygen therapists.

The huge increase in the number of calls was due to peoples’ fears. It was difficult for us to answer them quickly and sometimes they had to wait quite a while or we called them back thinking: My God! What am I going to say to this person? And then, at the other end of the phone was a person who was so grateful, because they just wanted to be reassured that they were doing the right thing.

MADRID — SPAIN

Now, in the month of August, we are seeing another surge in cases. There are a lot of surges in Spain and we are very worried about how it will be in September. Now that they are finding a lot of asymptomatic people, people are more uncertain about what is going to happen. That is one of the most common reasons customers call, because that is what we are going through as a country.

I live with my husband and my two children. We have had to adapt. It is hard, especially as the children are so young. But hey, if they appear in a meeting or someone sees them, it’s not that bad. Everyone understands that you are at home and things are different.

I think we have worked really well and now we need to keep going forward, always giving our best. �

I was lucky to be a nurse

laura alvargonzalez Director of Nursing Hospital Sanitas La Moraleja

The nursing supervisors and I need to be seen to be strong, the ones with the answers, even when we are just as worried as everyone else. The attitude and dedication of the staff is indescribable. I can’t begin to express how proud I have been of our staff, how they have surprised me time and time again in a positive way, and the knowledge we have built up between us in this crisis. Covid hit our hospital suddenly with our first case, on a Friday. The next week we had reached 50 cases and it carried on like that for the first weeks. On 11 March a state of emergency was declared in Spain and on 18 March the hospital was full, all of them Covid patients. We were forced to cancel every other scheduled appointment, except emergencies. We had to create new circuits and procedures, making almost a whole new organisation. We opened extra units and had to double the number of beds in the hospital and in the intensive care unit and also reinforce our emergency department. Madrid was one of Spain’s worst-affected areas. There weren’t enough staff – they had all been called up by the public health service. We had more and more patients to treat, and management were asking more and more of us. Sometimes I would get cross with my boss, as if the pandemic was his fault. We had to change. We were used to having one patient per room and we had to double them up. It wasn’t just the extra workload, it was the psychological burden.

MADRID — SPAIN

We would get to work at seven in the morning and go home at midnight or 1 a.m. the next day. We worked like that for six weeks, without one single day off, because we couldn’t stay at home. We weren’t the only ones – nearly all the staff had that attitude, with very few exceptions. They worked double shifts, which was physically and mentally exhausting, and didn’t complain. It wasn’t the work itself that was too much for us, but the helplessness we felt as everything was out of our hands, out of our control and beyond our knowledge. We have evolved since then in our knowledge of Covid and as a result we work differently now. At the beginning, we were applying treatments that didn’t work with poor results. Little by little, we started to change our procedures, to understand what we were fighting, and this was a great boost for our morale. One of our successes was the recovery of Juan Antonio, a 53 year old man, our first patient in the new ICU, which was actually the operating room, converted for the purpose. That happened on 29 March. His recovery was an injection of strength for us all. It was also a great and well-deserved reward for the professionals who experienced it. It was the operating room nurses who managed to save a great guy. They were amazing! I am so lucky to work for this company! We had so many people supporting us. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say: I need masks, more beds, people to look after the children, and our people would come to work willingly, even renting hotel rooms so they didn’t infect their families. Another key thing was that Sanitas has been working with video appointments for a long time. Our director has insisted on the implementation of digital technology. To be honest, health professionals are very reluctant in some ways, because we like to be able to see and touch things, and because of that, it took over a year to introduce the digital platforms. Then suddenly, Covid forced us to do in one week what would have taken us ten years. Perhaps we will never fully appreciate how far we have come and how much it has meant to be able to hold remote consultations. We must not forget that our non-Covid patients needed and deserved our attention. In the first weeks the world shut down and patients came in alone, without anyone accompanying them, because we couldn’t control what they touched or whether they were well-protected, and we had to be careful not to spread the disease.