"It's a kind of faint feeling"

2022-02-23T09:04:02.498Z

"It's a kind of faint feeling" Created: 2022-02-23Updated: 2022-02-23 09:59 dr Peter Kreissl, medical director and chief physician for general, visceral and vascular surgery at the Ebersberg district clinic. © Alexander Zettl www.zettl-media dr Peter Kreissl, Medical Director of the Ebersberg District Clinic, looks back on two years of the pandemic from the doctors' point of view District – Po

"It's a kind of faint feeling"

Created: 2022-02-23Updated: 2022-02-23 09:59

Peter Kreissl, medical director and chief physician for general, visceral and vascular surgery at the Ebersberg district clinic.

Peter Kreissl, Medical Director of the Ebersberg District Clinic, looks back on two years of the pandemic from the doctors' point of view

District – Postponing operations, restructuring wards: Constantly having to make decisions that affect the well-being and often the lives of patients has taken on a completely different dimension during the corona pandemic.

The mental burden on doctors is immense.

Peter Kreissl, medical director and chief physician for general, visceral and vascular surgery, gives an insight into the grueling work of the medical team in Ebersberg.

Kreissl, what has bothered you and your colleagues the most over the past two years

Phew, picking one point out of the whole package of challenges isn't that easy.

I think the worst thing was the fear of a triage, i.e. having to decide which corona patient to treat and which one to let die if the clinic was completely overloaded.

For me and certainly for the whole team, that was a nightmare that pushed us to our moral and ethical limits.

Was there a triage in Ebersberg?

Thank God no.

At the peak of the last wave just before Christmas 2021 we had a scary shortage of intensive care beds and it was also difficult to find a free bed for Covid patients in other clinics because they felt the same way.

But finally the hospital coordinator for Ebersberg and Erding managed to organize two transfers to Hamburg.

So we didn’t have on-site triage, but there was covert triage: tumor patients who could not be treated in the way that would have been good for them, or patients who, for fear of being infected with corona, did not deal with acute illnesses either married to the clinic.

Fortunately, since vaccination has been available, people's fear of infection has lessened.

Operations had to be postponed.

How did this affect patients and themselves

At this point I would like to emphasize that emergencies and tumors were always operated on during the entire time.

Only elective operations were postponed by order of the Bavarian state government, i.e. planned or elective operations, for example on the knee, hip or gallbladder or inguinal hernias.

However, we have made this dependent on the pain situation.

A team of doctors from the respective departments called each affected patient beforehand and asked them how they were doing, whether they were in a lot of pain or had serious limitations.

The decision to reschedule the surgery was then made at chief physician level.

Most of the patients were very understanding, which was a great help to us.

If the surgery could not be postponed, we had to find a solution and create additional space and human resources.

One of the biggest challenges during the pandemic, right?

However!

We had and still have to constantly adapt to changes in the situation, move patients from normal wards to set up corona isolation wards, scale back our routine work in every crisis to generate staff from all departments, and restructure everything again in phases of relaxation.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, the motto was: completely rethink.

Specialists from other areas, such as plastic surgery or urology, had to help care for Covid patients and suddenly take on tasks that they had never done before.

In the second and third waves, in which up to 40 percent of Covid patients were in the clinic, this included, for example, conducting rounds on these patients in the normal wards.

Before that, the colleagues had to be briefed by the internists on medication and other therapy measures.

The cardiologists who look after the Covid patients in the intensive care unit received support from anesthesiologists in critical phases.

The question that was particularly stressful was: How much capacity do we have to keep free in order to be able to treat in-house emergencies in intensive care, such as patients who spontaneously develop heart or lung problems, but also for other, external emergencies.

It's a kind of powerlessness, not knowing what's going to happen next and living with the fear of not being able to meet your medical standards.