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Due to the high number of Covid patients, clinics postpone certain operations that have nothing to do with Corona. For those affected, this can mean anger and suffering.
Ulm – “I try to see it rationally, but sometimes I get angry,” says the 63-year-old former nurse. Her date of the operation has been postponed again, she still has no prospect of when it might come.
What remains is the pain and the psychological stress. The 63-year-old is waiting – like more and more people in Germany – for an operation because the clinics with the large number of Covid patients in the intensive care units are busy and are therefore postponing so-called predictable operations.
Three quarters of the clinics are affected
According to the German Hospital Association, three quarters of all clinics nationwide are no longer in normal operation and have to postpone operations. “The situation is really increasingly dramatic and with some of the discontinued treatments also leads to physical and psychological stress for the patients concerned,” said the chairman of the board of the German Hospital Association, Gerald Gaß, in Berlin. For hospitals, postponing operations that can be planned is currently the method of choice in order to be able to continue providing care for acute cases. According to the information, the typical predictable operations include above all orthopedic operations.
When the former nurse from Buchloe in the Bavarian Allgäu turned to the doctor Gerhard Achatz at the Bundeswehr hospital in Ulm for her hip joint operation in September, her operation was scheduled for spring 2022. The operation has now been postponed indefinitely.
There are days when she can hardly walk, reports the former nurse, who does not want to read her name in the media. The uncertainty and how to deal with the pain have become so stressful that she struggles with depression. The 63-year-old had to give up her job due to a chronic osteoarthritis disease. Now she can no longer even do light gardening work, she says. She does not want to blame the unvaccinated solely for the situation in the clinics. But she gets angry at those who believe in conspiracy theories and therefore not get vaccinated, she says.
Most of the Covid patients are not vaccinated
Her doctor Gerhard Achatz, Deputy Clinical Director at the Bundeswehr Hospital Ulm, also reports that the majority of Covid patients are unvaccinated. He is convinced that the current situation in the clinics doesn’t have to be like this: “With the vaccine, we now have an opportunity to get the pandemic under control. But the vaccination rate is still too low. “
In the field of orthopedics and trauma surgery alone, there are currently around ten to twelve fewer operations per week at the Bundeswehr Hospital in Ulm than usual due to the exposure to Covid patients. This also puts a strain on the doctors. They are often dissatisfied because in many cases they do not live up to their demands in the treatment of patients, says the senior physician.
The fact that some patients wait so long for an operation date is also due to the fact that doctors, such as those in Ulm, were unable to catch up on all the operations that could be planned in the summer that had already been postponed in the previous waves of pandemics. A later surgery appointment can definitely have an impact on the findings or the chances of success of a patient, says Achatz. This is especially the case with cancer patients, as studies have shown.
Postponed operations
According to evaluations by the German Hospital Association, in the second wave of pandemics from October 2020 to February 2021, the number of cases of cancer surgery fell by 6 percent for breast cancer and 18 percent for colon cancer. The majority of the postponed operations, however, related to orthopedic interventions. During this period, around 22 percent fewer hip prostheses were operated on.
From the point of view of chairman Eugen Brysch from the patient protection foundation, patients are also exposed to a legal gray area. The definition of predictable operations is legally indeterminate and practically intangible, he criticizes. There is no official list of medical interventions that could be postponed in the event of an impending overload. That also leads to great uncertainty among patients, according to Brysch.
Due to the continued high number of new corona infections, the hospital company expects an increase in postponed, plannable operations. Like the 63-year-old former nurse, more people in Germany will soon have to do without their operation for the time being. dpa
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