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Fernando Prados placeholder image was on the front line in the provisional hospital of Ifema, and then transferred that model to the emergency center Nurse Isabel Zendal. An experience that, he believes, “is already the history of Medicine.”
-How do you get to the Zendal Hospital?
-In December 2020, following the Ifema experience, they asked me to join this project. The guidelines and the structure of what to do were already very clear to us. We started it with the uncertainty of knowing what was going to happen: pandemics have peaks of attention that are not constant or predictable; and you had to be prepared for everything.
-At the beginning, all the lights were on here.
-Yes, the spotlights were on from the beginning, since President Díaz Ayuso decided to create a hospital to be able to treat the different peaks of the Covid.
After the successful experience of Ifema, considering something structural, that would last, that was not provisional, was pure common sense, what to do when you are faced with a situation where the number of patients exceeds the possibilities of the system.
-But it has not been done in other countries
-It has been tried to do, but it is difficult to get this up and running in a few months. And put it into operation with different forms of management, not with the usual ones: you have to improvise things and not everyone dares to do that. The easy thing is to do what was done at the beginning of the pandemic, which is something provisional to get out of the way, and with lower quality levels, because logically it is not the same to establish a system of care for patients in tents than in a structure like this. We put into practice the solution that common sense tells you to take, naturally exposed to the fact that you have to eat it and that in the end it will not have any results, but that courage had to give its success. And the success was being able to finish the building before the third wave started, which was very strong, and put almost 600 patients here.
-What would have happened in Madrid if the Zendal had not been opened?
-That would have to be better answered by colleagues from the emergency services, who had to attend to patients every day and admit them and they might not because they did not have beds. It has been the difference between being with 60 patients – who do not fit in any emergency department because it is not designed to keep 60 patients, but to see them and refer them to discharge or hospitalization – to being able to work more normally. Without Zendal, the emergency services of the hospitals would have had a much worse time than they did. Anyone who does not see that is because they do not want to see it: more than 8,000 patients, put into the hospital system, would have caused quite a few more problems.
-It must be difficult to manage a hospital like Zendal, sometimes with 200 workers and sometimes with 1,000.
-Yes, managing like this is difficult. But both SAMUR and SUMMA, when they start their day, they know they can have 3,000 patients or they can have three. When you go to work in the emergency, you know that you have to eat when you can, and you have to go to the bathroom when you can, because you don’t know when you can. But the collaboration of the hospitals where the professionals came from has been extraordinary, and the will of most of the professionals who have worked here is absolutely fantastic: they know that they have participated in a project that will go down in the history of medicine in Madrid.
-How did Filomena live at the Zendal?
-In the middle of the pandemic, at the end you have a snowfall that makes it impossible for the movement of vehicles and the communication of this hospital with others, something essential because this center lived both in care and logistics of the other hospitals. But thanks to the effort and involvement of the people, at no time was there a problem of supplying anything; We had six hours of meals that we did not have, but they arrived.
-What will become of Zendal when the pandemic ends?
-We have to wait for it to finish, we don’t know when it will be. But the possibilities it has of being able to adapt to any health situation, gives a lot of scope: Zendal is there to solve the problems that the system may have. Now you have problems with waiting lists, or you have works in hospitals that have been built for more than 60 years and you have to reform them and refer your patients … You just have to see what you want to transfer and adapt the structure to that activity for the time that do missing. And also, we are going to have all 112 here, the Regional Public Health Laboratory, and a central warehouse that until now did not have the system. This hospital is not going to stop operating.
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