there are “patients crowded in the corridors”

The objective of the overwhelming letter, they explain, is to apologize and “empathize” with the patients in this problem, which “affects them directly.” They are especially aimed at older patients, cancer patients, those with infectious processes and, also, their relatives and those who have lost a loved one there. Also to those who were there waiting to be treated, suffered from the cold, or waited hours for someone from the nursing staff, for a stretcher, or received care or information in front of other unknown people because they did not have individual spaces. Finally, the note addresses the nursing profession itself: “For not honoring you as you have always deserved, for vilifying you in a context where nurses feel more and more alone in the fight to offer quality nursing care to our patients ”.

Below, we reproduce the full letter disseminated by the nursing professionals of the HUNSC Emergency Department:

“Frustration, impotence, indignation are the feelings that we nurses in the emergency department of the Nuestra Señora de La Candelaria University Hospital experience every time we face a workday. Few situations fill us with such a sad and denigrating feeling for our professional pride than seeing how patients day after day remain crowded in the corridors and in the observation rooms, many of which have been improvised in recent months not even with the most basic material resources to be able to provide safe, dignified and quality health care. Rooms without sufficient electricity connections to allow the connection of an infusion pump or so that the patient can recharge the battery of his mobile phone to communicate with his relatives. Sudden rooms that do not have the installation of an oxygen outlet or secretion suction outlets, which do not have a service so that the patient can meet her needs in an intimate way. Areas that used to be simple halls and that have now been turned into disorganized common observation rooms where patients are piled up on uncomfortable stretchers, remaining for days waiting for a bed on the floor or until they receive medical discharge from the service itself. emergencies. Stretchers that are only a few tens of centimeters apart and often without at least one thin screen that tries to separate the personal privacy of the person being treated from the neighborhood. We work in an unworthy, indiscreet context, little reserved for the user that not only impregnates the care that nurses offer to patients with a bad image, but also involves our own profession from an ethical and moral perspective, related to our code of ethics , and that leads us to undermine the bioethical principles of our profession. The reason for this letter is none other than to turn to our patients, apologize for these situations, and empathize with them in a problem that directly affects them.

So, to you, our elderly patient, we want to apologize if you remained for days on an uncomfortable stretcher waiting for a hospital bed, leading to pain in your sacrum, heels, and other bony prominences. To you, cancer patient, for having kept you for hours in crowded waiting rooms or busy corridors despite the fact that your state of health required an individual room or at least with a smaller influx of people, but our emergency service does not have this condition. To you, a patient with an infectious process with the capacity to infect or immunodeficient disease, who required isolation, be it contact, respiratory, airborne, or reverse, we are sorry that we have not been able to provide you with that specialized room as soon as possible, since We only have one cabin for these contexts and in most cases it is already occupied. To you too, relatives, who have had to experience the loss of a loved one in our service, and have had to share those delicate moments in a room with more patients, separated by a screen, without the privacy and sufficient heat required the occasion. We are sorry if you have been waiting for nursing care for hours, but we are usually overwhelmed by excessive demand and cannot cope with the available staff. If you were cold at night in the service corridors, then our warehouse rarely has enough blankets to keep you warm. If you woke up with cervical pain or spent an uncomfortable night for not having a pillow to offer you, we’re sorry, we don’t have a reasonable number of them. We are sorry if we had to change your diaper, give you information about your state of health, make you a nursing technician, or if you had to relieve yourself in a urinal or in a diaper, in the presence of other patients, not guaranteeing your privacy, but the available infrastructures do not have the familiarity to do so. Family, if we did not have a place to welcome you and you remained standing all night next to your sick loved one, when your intention was to collaborate, take care of him, and help the health professionals, we are sorry. To the patient who could expel respiratory secretions with difficulty and we did not have the installation of a suction outlet in the room or corridor where you suffered it in order to help you, we are sorry. When you needed to carry out a nursing technique in an observation box and you had to wait for hours for it, since they were blocked due to not having enough space to place the patients who had already been assessed. We apologize if you had to wait inside the ambulance for a stretcher to be available in the service, as this is an increasingly common situation. Nor was it my intention to delay the administration of the medication because I couldn’t find a foot of serum where I could house it for its infusion.

To you, a patient with a psychiatric condition, we regret having had you with a prescribed mechanical restraint in a corridor in conditions of zero privacy and dignity, while you “unintentionally” yelled or yelled, but for a long time we no longer have the passenger compartment that we had in the past for these situations. To you, a patient awaiting colonoscopy and we gave you a solution to evacuate the intestinal contents, we would have liked to have offered you your own service, such as the hospitalization service, and not have made you share a bathroom all night with other patients , having to contain the intestinal emergency situation for it to be free. To you too, colleague, family member, patient, we apologize if we were able to give you a bad answer as a result of work overload, because sometimes these situations push us to the limit of our self-control. We apologize if, while waiting for a hospital bed to become available, you needed a more comfortable one in the emergency department where you could wait and we could not offer it to you, but it is a general rule that these emergency beds are occupied for months due to dozens of problems to the expectation of a procedure unrelated to health care. To our nursing profession, the one that in a dignified manner aims to offer quality care to the patient, that you have always been a vocational, passionate and prestigious profession for your involvement in solving the health problems of the sick, forgive us for emptying you of content , for not honoring you as you have always deserved, for vilifying you in a context where nurses feel more and more alone in the fight to offer quality nursing care to our patients.

Kind regards, HUNSC Emergency Nursing“.