​The Victor Homoiu Children’s Hospital in Bucharest is at risk of suspending its activities at any moment in any sector, including the waiting room, after the health system employment was blocked last May and the hospital management failed to do so to organize competitions for positions, says Dr. Kostel Vlad, medical director of the medical department, for News.ro. “There used to be one nurse serving 120-200 patients who appeared on duty,” says the doctor.

“People are tired, they started to quit”

“We are in a situation where we are minimally staffed in all departments of the hospital, especially in the guard room. It is necessary to go back a little, namely to May, when the positions were blocked, and we could no longer hold competitions for the replacement of positions. It seems to me that people no longer live in the paradigm in which our parents or even we lived, in which you look for a job and retire from there. The workforce migrates, as do paramedics, for various reasons, illness, job change, moving to another country, to another location, maternity leave, they end up leaving, so we leave vacancies that we can’t fill.” , says Dr. Kostel Vlad.

The doctor adds that “I constantly sent assistants from other departments, people were all tired. By this time in December, I had seconded assistants from other departments, from pediatrics, from orthopedics, from surgery, from ENT, from neurology, from intensive care, from everywhere. Slowly, slowly, all the people got tired, they started to quit, especially after I rearranged them, so now, at the end of the year, we’re all out of people. In almost any department of the hospital, if someone gets sick, quits, goes on maternity leave, goes on hiatus, we can shut down that sector because we don’t have enough nurses to provide the right care. »

He notes that at almost any time, if the medical personnel stop their work for various reasons, the respective departments of the hospital where they worked can suspend their work. The situation is the same especially in the guardhouse, which is also under threat of suspension of its activities due to lack of personnel. The doctor talks about the enormous amount of work of paramedics and the impossibility of providing them with adequate days off, which can lead to professional burnout.

“Ambulance is the hottest area, because it is the connection with the patient who comes to the hospital with an emergency, so we considered it necessary to sound the alarm precisely for this area of ​​activity, because the patient feels the lack of people from the security the most. Concretely, it can happen, and it happened, that one nurse can serve 120-200 patients who appear in the trauma center per day, and this is very little.”

We put patients at risk”

He adds that “patient frustrations pile up, long waits, the nurse eventually gives up because it’s too much for one person, and we’re trying to handle everything that comes our way in the ER, doing nothing but seeing patients. with risk So, at the end of last year, together the heads of the departments considered it more correct to limit the activity to the time when we can provide acceptable medical assistance, and to interrupt the activity at night, because there is no one left. carry it Then we agreed with the manager, with the employees, to spend this leave, but in the following months there is such a risk: that at any moment we will not have someone to ensure the continuity of nursing shifts, let’s say, we will no longer be able to take care of you in the waiting room and refer patients to other hospitals.”

Victor Homoiu Hospital currently needs 75 paramedics and 25 nurses, says the medical director. The situation is currently extremely difficult, especially in the waiting room, where 8 nurses do the work of 20, says Dr. Kostel Vlad. Moreover, mistakes can be made at the patient’s bedside precisely because there are not enough assistants, he points out: “At the hospital level, there are 100 positions that need to be filled, of which 75 are nurses and 25 are nurses. At the duty level, we have 8 nurses who perform the work of 20 nurses. For each assistant, this means 2-3 additional shifts, it means a week of work, it means that in four weeks the assistant performs five weeks of work. This means reducing rest time, it means that we are on the edge of the Labor Code, sometimes even breaking it, because we have nowhere to go, in the sense that we cannot give people compensatory breaks, enough rest, we cannot pay them extra, but then they accumulate days off, which we keep accruing because we can’t provide them because we don’t have the staff. This then leads to fatigue, overtiredness and finally errors that can be made at the patient’s bedside.”

It is necessary to quickly unlock the positions, says the medical director, because at this moment patients may be in danger. In the Victor Homoiu Hospital, at least in the last year, about 100,000 children from Bucharest, as well as from other regions of the country, have been consulted and 10,000 have been hospitalized.

“Our hospital is small, I would say, we have about 200 beds, in a year we consult 100,000 children, admit 10,000 and operate on 3,000. I can neither be a financier nor a resource manager, in real life I have some patients that I have to take care of with certain people. We have reached the point where there are so few of us that the patient is practically at risk. And from our point of view, the unblocking of the situation should be quick, that is, the unblocking of competitions for positions in the health care system,” says Dr. Kostel Vlad.

“The legislation is made in such a way that tenders can be organized on the basis of a memorandum. Steps were taken and we took them through the hospital administration, these memoranda were submitted several times, they remained unanswered until the end of 2023, when we were told that it was the end of the year anyway and they could no longer be unlocked. , on the one hand, on the other hand, for 2024, as I read in the emergency resolution, competitions can be organized only for vacant positions in 2024. The problem is that if I am fired in another position in 2024, I will cease to exist because I can no longer carry out activities, so it does not help me at all, and the positions fired in 2023 can only be replaced based on a memorandum, a mechanism, which did not help us at all in 2023,” concludes the hospital’s medical director Viktora Homoiu.

Read also:

• Bucharest Hospitals Administration: Gomoiu Children’s Hospital Security Room under threat of closure due to lack of staff / employment, blocked by the government since last year