In the Salzburg state clinics, 65 doctors and 260 nurses are currently missing, mainly because of Corona, according to a recent report by ORF Salzburg. Due to a lack of staff, 200 hospital beds in the state could not be occupied. In the university hospital, 120 beds in the internal ward are affected, a hospital spokesman is quoted as saying. Procedures that are not absolutely necessary must be postponed. The description by the daughter of an 87-year-old resident of a retirement home in Salzburg caused a sensation. The elderly woman was acutely worse at the beginning of the week. She was therefore admitted to the state hospital by a doctor, but was sent home the same day because there was no place for her there, the daughter told the “Salzburger Nachrichten” (SN).

“Hard Bed”

The pensioner spent the whole of Monday on an examination table in the emergency room. “Even the doctor called it a hard bunk.” In the evening they said they didn’t have a bed for her yet. She should go to the retirement home to sleep. The next day, the 87-year-old was taken to the hospital again by ambulance and lay there for hours in a treatment bunk. Only when she intervened with the medical management of the hospital did her mother get a place on the first medicine on Tuesday afternoon, the daughter told the SN. “I didn’t want to accept that my mother would die on a couch in the emergency room.”

The hospital told the SN that the doctors could not find any acute problem, and since there was no free bed in an internal medicine ward, the woman was sent home to sleep. According to clinic spokesman Wolfgang Fürweger, nursing staff are currently dealing with many quarantine cases. In the middle of the week, 88 Covid patients were treated in internal beds. In addition, 60 other patients were cared for who had had a Covid infection as an accompanying diagnosis.

Not a single free medical bed on Monday

Fürweger told the ORF that treatments that are not acute and not urgent must be postponed. On Monday there was not a single free internal medicine bed in the state of Salzburg north of Pass Lueg. But emergencies are of course to be financed. The doctors and nursing staff would do their best every day for the well-being of the patients.