Trabajo en equipo del personal del Hospital de Barcelona

An unprecedented restructuring of the Hospital

The pandemic caused by Covid-19 forced the Hospital de Barcelona to redesign and adapt its services, teams and infrastructures, while continuing to treat patients with other pathologies.

Adapted to the Covid-19 times, without forgetting patients with other pathologies. This is the premise used by Assistència Sanitària to face up to the coronavirus pandemic. Its reference centre, the Hospital de Barcelona, increased its capacity to the maximum number of beds and it reorganised its entire activity to treat Covid-19 patients, whilst maintaining urgent surgery and oncological treatments. Obstetrics and neonatology also continued. Thanks to these initiatives, over a 50 day period, they attended around 600 Covid-19 patients.

During the pandemic, the Hospital de Barcelona redesigned all the circuits to isolate Covid-19 patients from all others; it extended the ICUs with three new spaces; it created a new emergency room and it relied on retired doctors to carry out information tasks for patients’ families. Additionally, a specific consulting room was set up to attend infected healthcare personnel.

The entity also designed a specific protocol for free telephone attention for the entire population, policyholders or not, led by a team made up of nurses and doctors from the entity, which recommended different healthcare services to the population in terms of each case and according to some pre-established criteria. The idea was to guide and answer queries for people who had symptoms or who lived with affected people, aimed at helping to decongest the public healthcare system. During the period the service was in action, from the 19th of March to the 8th of May, (the toughest weeks of the pandemic), over 6,000 calls were attended, with an average of 500 calls per day. “At all times the maximum level of service and care quality was guaranteed, from the start of the epidemic until now, with some levels of excellence that are difficult to equal in any other place,” affirms Doctor Jordi Jimeno, a doctor working for Assistència Sanitària and coordinator of this unit.

This has been possible thanks to a team of professionals that have given their best and more during the most critical months. For this reason, from the very beginning, Assistència Sanitària undertook to maintain the jobs of all their healthcare workers and administrative personnel, promoting work from home and increasing the medical and nursing staff. The entity also joined the sectorial fund of 38 million euros to protect the healthcare workers and developed a programme to maintain the medical consulting rooms affected due to inactivity.

Recognition

“Reinventing ourselves in 50 days was a challenge that has been successfully achieved due to the organisation work, defining and optimising processes, but particularly thanks to the effort and involvement of some extraordinary teams of professionals,” affirms M. Ángels Font, chairwoman of SCIAS Hospital de Barcelona. Work that has been recognised by citizens, with innumerable messages of encouragement and initiatives such as the supportive postcards sent by users using photographs of the hospital’s healthcare personnel.