
4 minute read
My small part in the fight against the pandemic
At times, it all seemed like a maze
maría casas Nurse Sanitas 24 hours Sanitas Healthcare Funding
I work attending urgent phone calls. The pandemic hasn’t been the same for me as for those who work directly with patients. We have offered a service for families who can’t go into the hospitals or patients being managed at home because the hospitals have been full. Everyone in our service was sent to work from home and we were provided with laptops and we continued to provide our 24-hour urgent telephone service. It was usually more about fear than symptoms: I travelled, or I was in contact with someone who travelled; I went to Italy … We would advise our patients that unless they had serious symptoms such as breathlessness or fever, that they should stay at home. We also asked them to quarantine as much as possible. The worst thing was when healthcare staff got Covid. It got more complicated then. There weren’t the medical teams to look after patients, and nowhere to refer them to. Field hospitals were even set up, because the current hospitals weren’t coping. Soon, new teams were set up to support people who had coronavirus at home.
I think my mood changed. At times, it all seemed like a maze. So, for To start with, I didn’t even example, a family had to send an older couple have time to think. There were so many calls, and I in an ambulance and couldn’t go with them. To start with, we and the family would know which hospital they were going to, but sometimes we lost spent so many hours at the track of them. We didn’t even know if there would computer there wasn’t time for thinking. be a bed for them when the ambulance got to the hospital. The family would ask: Please, write down our phone number and call us when you know what is happening. The families knew that once their sick relatives had been taken away in the ambulance, they might not see them again. There was a lot of uncertainty. The ambulance driver might say: I am taking your father to such and such a hospital. But you wouldn’t know how long the person might be there for or how it would be, or whether they would be put on a ventilator, or taken to another hospital. At the beginning, that was happening to hundreds and thousands of people. It was really difficult. The families had so many questions about their relative: Will they be on their own? Will they need anything? Will they suffer? Will everything be taken care of? Will someone look after their needs? And all of this was being done by phone call. Little by little, things got more organised, and they started centralising coronavirus admissions, which made it quicker and easier to locate people. To be honest, it was a feeling MADRID — SPAIN of complete helplessness, being on the computer at home, knowing that there were never enough staff. And it took longer to support people and help them by phone. We were getting a total of eight or ten thousand calls a day. Mostly, people were really understanding, just scared, but there were some people who were really angry. At the end of the day, it was a really unprecedented situation. I think my mood changed. To start with, I didn’t even have time to think. There were so many calls, and I spent so many hours at the computer there wasn’t time for thinking. I had to quarantine at my parents’ house recently and then I had some more time. Then we had a month and a half or two months when the volume of work was more or less normal, for that time of year, then at the start of July it was increasing, and got worse again. The fear came back, there were more cases again, but they were milder and less people needed to go to hospital, but there were still sick people. Now, in mid-August, cases and calls are rising again. More people are getting symptoms. Since life has gone back to “normal” cases are on the increase and that shows in the volume of work. I still need the help of my elderly parents. If my daughter picks it up at nursery, it would probably not be serious for her, but it would be for my parents. So I am worried too. Because children share everything. They pick things up and put them in their mouths. It is difficult to keep them apart. How can you make sure they don’t swap dummies, which is something so simple? As a nurse, I have worked for many years in hospitals and A&E and you will see someone coming through the door and pick up how they are. That’s the experience we have. I feel my work has been important because I have contributed to our emergency hospital services not collapsing.�
