Staff board claims new collapse of emergency department at major Malaga city hospital

A staff body at the Hospital Universitario Virgen de la Victoria in Malaga city (the former Clínico) reported a second collapse of the emergency department in just one month this week. On Monday (16 June), there were apparently 20 patients, some of them seriously ill or injured, who had to wait between 36 and 48 hours for a bed. However, this has been denied by the hospital board that claimed that there were only 13 patients involved and that waiting time did not exceed 15 hours.

The management team explained that, on Monday, it once again exceeded the figure of one thousand people in the emergency department, giving an idea of the pressure on care this entails. A similar situation was experienced just a few days ago, when the number of patients waiting to be referred reached 30. Discharges, as well as the setting up of additional beds and the transfer of patients to other health centres, alleviated the state of collapse a little. However, it must be noted that this is happening before the summer has officially begun - and it can be expected that things will get worse as Malaga's population grows.

The president of the staff board (the body that represents all trade unions), Juan Antonio Martos Aguilar, described Monday's situation as "Dantesque": eight stretchers X with people "with serious diagnoses, including one person suffering a heart attack in an unmonitored chair, others with heart failure waiting for a bed: people could die on a stretcher or in a chair".

Martos has called for the resignation of the hospital manager, stating: "There are no beds, things are not managed well; the stretchers are deteriorated and in a poor condition, there are people with pleural effusions, haemorrhagic strokes, metastatic oncology patients, waiting for beds and waiting between 36 and 48 hours, now we have 20 patients waiting for beds, eight of them on X stretchers waiting to be placed."

According to Martos, technicians and nurses, as well as the rest of the staff, are "suffering from a huge overload of work and care is not what it should be".

According to the hospital itself, all patients were attended to on Monday, despite their number reaching over a thousand. Clínico's management insists that things are being taken care of and prioritised according to the admission order.