le CHU Pellegrin de Bordeaux déclenche son Plan Blanc
Two weeks before the end of the year celebrations, the CHU Pellegrin de Bordeaux announces this Wednesday through a press release triggered the “Plan Blanc” (level 2) in order to face the Covid epidemic. The objective is to reallocate staff and beds in order to increase reception capacities in intensive care.
“73 patients with Covid including 35 in critical care, an intensive care unit 100% full”
The Bordeaux University Hospital Center is faced with a conjunction of several phenomena. First of all, there is the 5th wave which breaks in Gironde with in particular the first hospitalizations of patients with the Omicron variant. The Department “is particularly affected with record incidence rates since the start of the epidemic at nearly 500 per 100,000 inhabitants. “ To this outbreak of cases is added the bronchiolitis epidemic itself associated with “a lack of personnel “, indicates a doctor from the CHU.
Opening of intensive care and medical beds
Sets off “in consultation with the Regional Health Agency of Nouvelle-Aquitaine“, the activation of the White Plan will lead to the deprogramming of operations and consultations deemed non-urgent such as cataracts or the fitting of a knee prosthesis. Only cancer and organ transplant care are treated.
“Hospitalization capacities currently at their maximum”
The Plan Blanc system makes it possible to “release caregivers and reopen beds in intensive care and“. To open two critical care beds, you need, for example, seven nurses. “Nurses are the sinews of war “, summarizes a practitioner from Pellegrin who speaks of recruitment difficulties at the national level.
The management of the Bordeaux University Hospital indicates that the staff of caregivers reassigned and “the exact number of bed openings [[sera affiné]]in the coming days”.
“A risk of saturation of hospital capacities in the coming weeks”
The activation of the White Plan comes in an already tense context. “For nearly two months, the emergency and hospitalization departments of the CHU have been facing particularly significant activity in a certain number of fields of medicine, geriatrics and pediatrics “.
With the bronchiolitis epidemic in particular, some young patients would have been hospitalized alongside adults in intensive care to compensate for the saturation of the pediatric critical care service.
“In this context of tension, adds the management of the Bordeaux University Hospital, the rapid acceleration in the activity of patients with covid observed in recent days entails a risk of saturation of hospital reception capacities in the weeks weeks. “