Sandra Ramos’s mother was admitted to the emergency room of the Canary Islands University Hospital (HUC), on the island of Tenerife, around three in the afternoon on Friday, October 11. The 65-year-old woman went to this service on the recommendation of her family doctor. That same morning, the doctor had detected worrying values of transaminases in her patient’s last blood test, who also showed signs of jaundice (yellowish skin). Suspecting that she might suffer some liver damage, he decided to refer her immediately.
Ramos (36 years old) says that her mother spent more than three days in the emergency room “sitting in a chair” (the so-called clinical or geriatric chairs, with arms, a slight inclination in the backrest and footrest) until last Monday night she A bed was freed up in the Obstetrics service and it could be transferred to the ward.
Your case cannot be considered exceptional. The collapse of the service is structural. The photograph that illustrates this report was taken this week in those same emergencies, those of the reference hospital for the population of the north of Tenerife. A young man is lying on three hard plastic chairs located in a converted old waiting room. At that time he had been there for two days, with fever and a route through which serum was administered, according to the sources consulted by this newspaper.
“We all know about the collapse of the health system, but when we hear or read any news about it, we swallow saliva and pray that it doesn’t touch us. Until it’s our turn. And in the end we say: how lucky you already have a room. We move on to the next state and forget everything we have been through. “We have naturalized inhuman conditions,” laments Ramos, who emphasizes that his complaint is directed towards the managers and not towards the health personnel who cared for his mother, who were “attentive, with good humor and good disposition even in the chaos.” .
The young woman says that her mother had to wait until ten at night, about seven hours after entering the emergency room, to be evaluated by a doctor who ordered an ultrasound and some tests. Before, around seven, they had taken his blood pressure.
The patient had been placed in one of the spaces that have been set up to try to decongest the emergency pit and stretcher area, as part of a contingency plan. “It was like a waiting room full of seats with footrests. When I went (relatives can make two visits a day, for a single person and a maximum of fifteen minutes) there were about six or seven people, all close together, but one of the days my mother told me that they had just added more seats.” , remembers his daughter.
Sandra Ramos’ mother sat in that chair for more than 80 hours because there were no free beds on the hospital floors. There he ate and “snoozed” when he could. He only got up to go to the bathroom and clean up. “She was very tired and couldn’t move and walk” because if she did “it would hinder the work of the staff,” says her daughter, who describes hallways packed with stretchers. “Not a soul could fit in. They were full. You had to stand to the side so the toilets could pass. The visitors were standing, glued to the stretchers, they couldn’t even sit down. “It was horrible.”
No sunlight enters that room and the patients, not only in that room, suffer from a lack of privacy. Sandra says that there were lines to enter the bathroom and that, although everyone was wearing masks, they were stuck together in the room, “elbow to elbow.” Even when, for example in the case of his mother, there were suspicions that the pathology could have a viral origin.
Ramos insists that the treatment of the health personnel was “correct at all times,” although he noted not only “tiredness” in the workers, but also a certain boredom at having to endure this work overload. “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, they are people who have to take care of their mental health,” says this citizen, who regrets that sometimes health workers become “the target” to which complaints are directed. “You have to complain, but you have to know to whom. You have to aim high, look at the top because that is where the mismanagement is and the root of the problem,” he concludes.
A structural collapse
The staff has been denouncing for years a structural collapse in the health and social health system that manifests itself in the emergencies of the Canary Islands hospitals. A funnel is created because more patients are admitted than are discharged. The front door is usually the emergency room. Corridors have ceased to be transit areas and have become work areas. And for some time now, and given this lack of space, other rooms have been progressively enabled to try to alleviate this saturation. In the HUC, with geriatric seats or even waiting room chairs.
Meanwhile, the ambulances remain blocked 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 the patients. With the added problem that this transport remains inoperative during that time to attend to other emergencies.
Workers speak of a combination of factors to explain the health collapse. The main one, the mismatch between resources and healthcare demand. With an increasingly aging population and more chronic multi-pathological patients, there is a shortage of personnel, but also of spaces, with obsolete infrastructures that, in the case of the HUC, “were too small the day they opened,” as recently stated Alejandro Gordillo, spokesperson for the Satse nursing union in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
In addition, there is another problem that transcends the strictly health field and that continues not to be tackled despite the years that have passed since the first warning signs. This involves the blocking of beds on hospitalization 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 relatives give up due to lack of institutional support. In others, the 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, who live alone. And, above all, due to the lack of places in residences to receive the social and health care they require.
Patricia Hernández, delegate of Intersindical Canaria (IC), pointed out last week that on the island of Tenerife alone there are 400 patients in this situation. “No local administration has taken care of its older, aging population, who lives in hospitals. It is very sad and does not depend on the hospital management, but on the political will to solve this problem. And there isn’t. And it has not existed because we have been denouncing for years while the population ages and the hospitalization units fill up with patients who live for years in our hospitals,” he concludes.
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