Hospital Emergencies in Spain Struggle with Summer Surge and Resource Shortages

Hospital emergencies throughout Spain are saturated, a situation that health workers already anticipated before the summer, but which has worsened with an average of 10% more patients than in the same period last year, and with the most complicated weeks concentrated between July 15 and August 15.

The first vice president of the Spanish Society of Emergency and Emergency Medicine (SEMES), Pascual Piñera, has attributed this situation to the heat wave that has favored the decompensation of chronic pathologies in the elderly and the increase in covid cases -19, “not with many admissions, but with a lot of assistance in the emergency room”.

Another reason that overloads hospital emergencies, especially in summer, is, according to Piñera, the situation of Primary Care, with a shortage of personnel and resources that leads to a landing of patients in the emergency room, “service with easy access and open 24 hours”.

Piñera, head of the ER at the Reina Sofía University Hospital in Murcia, explains that the patients who do end up being admitted are the “elderly”, 75 years and over, with chronic illnesses and multiple pathologies, most affected by heat waves.

In fact, and according to this specialist, there is a progressive increase in emergency care for people over 85 years of age in summer, an upward trend for a decade.

Hotter and longer

From the Federation of Associations for the Defense of Public Health (FADSP), its spokesman Marciano Sánchez Bayle has agreed with the vice president of SEMES that this summer is worse than the previous one in terms of health pressure both due to heat waves, ” that destabilize the chronically ill”, such as the increase in covid cases.

“There will be more and more prolonged heat waves” and this will result in greater pressure on care in hospitals during the summer months, warned the FADSP spokesman.

Sánchez Bayle has also referred to the high closure of hospital beds throughout Spain and that, according to calculations by this Federation, the Community of Madrid leads, with more than 19% and almost 2,500 fewer beds in public hospitals during the months of July and August .

For this spokesperson, the situation in Madrid is “disproportionate to reality” for many reasons, “mainly because the population leaving the Community is less than it was a few years ago, and those who go on vacation do so for less time.”

In short, according to this platform of public health associations, the forecasts for closing beds have been fulfilled this summer in “excess” and exceed those of 2022, as well as the saturation of hospital emergencies.

Precisely in Madrid, 31 doctors from the La Paz University Hospital have filed a complaint this week with the duty judge for the “collapse” in the emergency services.

According to the Red Workers union, the hospital has dozens of patients about to be admitted while keeping 435 beds closed “with the excuse that fewer sick people come in summer.”

This month, the same union has also denounced that the La Paz pathology laboratory is overwhelmed with 11,600 biopsies pending analysis, many to diagnose some type of cancer.

Scooter accidents

However, emergencies are also saturated by banal pathologies and those linked to summer such as allergies, sunburn, dehydration, digestive disorders, gastroenteritis or food poisoning.

Some of the assistances that call attention due to their increase are those referring to injuries caused by driving scooters.

According to the first vice president of SEMES, with the rental of scooters on the street their use has become widespread, but accidents involving users who use this means of transport without a helmet or protections have also increased.

This worries the emergency services that have been warning of this situation for months and asking the administrations concerned for measures.