Updated:
An intensive care doctor warns that the hospitals will have to shut down regular operations again. This will be unavoidable, especially in three federal states.
Berlin – The intensive care doctor Christian Karagiannidis expects the worsening Corona situation that hospitals will increasingly restrict regular operations again.
“We will hardly be able to avoid it,” said the scientific director of the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) on Tuesday evening in the ARD “Tagesthemen”. He referred this particularly to badly affected federal states such as Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia.
Postpone operating theaters, redeploy staff
Restricting regular operations means “that we really postpone operations that can be postponed because they are not life-threatening or because they are not tumors and redeploy the staff within the hospital,” said Karagiannidis. The Berlin Charité University Medicine has been canceling all planned interventions since Tuesday in order to deploy employees more intensively in Covid-19 wards.
Karagiannidis explained that about ten percent of intensive care beds in Germany are currently still free. That is relatively little, because an intensive care unit consists of an average of twelve beds – and therefore usually only one bed is free “for all emergencies that are not just Covid”. “And at the moment when we regionally drop below five percent free beds, we are in principle no longer able to act in the clinics. And that will overtake us relatively quickly in the next few weeks and, above all, months (…) at least in the hotspots that we have now – Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia. “
In order to curb the current increase in the number of corona cases, Karagiannidis demanded “2G and also 3G in the workplace” – it was seen in the European surrounding area that this had an effect on the first vaccination rate. He also spoke out in favor of booster vaccinations, initially for the elderly, but then also for the younger ones. dpa
#Intensive #care #physician #expects #surgery #postponed