On Thursday, 30 April, a Reader called us and informed the editorial office that we should correct information concerning the Emergency Department—namely, that patients with a direct or indirect threat to life are admitted to the ED. That day, as the person reporting the matter told us, an 85-year-old former doctor was not admitted with atrial fibrillation.
In her conversation with us, the Reader stressed that she herself had called the ED. There, she was told that only patients who were “in contact” or people infected with coronavirus were being admitted.
“Please understand: it is difficult to prepare a list of conditions for which we will admit patients and those for which we will not. I will give an example from last month: a paramedic who, while travelling to Bolesławiec, was stabbed in the chest. In that case, the matter was clear: he had to be operated on immediately, and transport to another facility was not possible,” istotne.pl Kamil Barczyk, director of the county hospital in Bolesławiec, explains to the service. “There was also a situation in which a patient under quarantine suffered a fracture. He was treated at our ED. However, we will not be able to help people with dizziness, chest pain, and so on, because we currently do not have departmental facilities prepared to treat such patients. As a dedicated COVID-19 hospital, we are intended to treat patients with COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19; in fact, we no longer have a neurology or internal medicine department here.
“We ask patients who are highly likely to require further hospitalization in a specialist department to go directly to other Emergency Departments,” K. Barczyk continues. “We are able to provide emergency care for injuries and help in the event of sudden cardiac arrest. Truly sudden and serious cases: accidents, disasters.
And he adds:
Considering the stability of the number of cases and the number of coronavirus patients, I hope that the hospital will soon return to the scope of activity it had before the epidemic.