Antonia Marín Sánchez couldn’t believe what she saw that night of October 9th. She was driving her car behind a medical ambulance in which her husband was traveling, who had just had a heart attack in their home in Huéscar (Granada) and several others stopped in the last few hours. At the Baza hospital they told her that the catheterization her husband needed required a transfer to Granada, to the Virgen de las Nieves hospital, and that they would change ambulances in Guadix. But when she arrived in Guadix, what she expected didn’t happen. “I figured we would go to the hospital, make the change and move on.” Hand. The stop occurred in a service area. And there, between the car wash and the petrol station, the two ambulances lined up and made the change.
Despite having been stopped three times in the last three or four hours, at 11pm. and “cold”, Antonia remembers, Toñi, they lowered the patient onto the stretcher, loaded him onto the other vehicle, disconnected the devices of the ambulance that was transporting him, connected him to the new ones and continued down the road. “I was perplexed by what happened there,” she comments days later. This transfer took at least 15 minutes.
It all started mid-afternoon that day, when Antonia’s husband had a heart attack. At the Huéscar health center they referred him to the Baza hospital and from there to the Granada hospital. It was already night. As a critical patient, if it had been during the day, the Public Health Emergency Company 061 (EPES 061) would have transferred him by helicopter – there is one for the province – or to a mobile ICU, by road, in a service subcontracted with the Los Angeles company, which has a mobile ICU for the entire province 24 hours a day.
The helicopter does not fly at night and the night service was carried out by the subcontractor, known in the industry as “the angels of the night”. And if these were not available, a team from the emergency service of the Bastet hospital did so. And always, in a transfer without stops. Until September. Since then there are no more Baza’s night angels, nor the hospital emergency room available for transfers.
The UGT reports that since October, night trips have been carried out just as Toñi experienced: from Baza to Guadix, with a stop at a petrol station where another medical ambulance arriving from the capital awaits. Three similar transfers were made in October and a fourth was activated only to be deactivated at the last minute.
A health worker familiar with the incident explains to EL PAÍS that this happened overnight, without warning. The emergency doctors at the hospital, he comments, refuse to continue doing it: “First of all, it’s not really their job and, furthermore, their conditions have worsened. Previously they did it on site – available from home – and now they have to report it to the hospital, among other things.” And since they don’t and THE The Night Angels are not available for the entire journey, the hospital management has decided that the Primary Care Emergency Services (SUAP) of Baza, the doctors who provide emergency assistance at the health center, will carry out the transfers of these critical patients.
In Baza there are two SUAPs that run the city and several surrounding towns, with up to 30,000 people in their care. These teams provide care at the Baza health center itself and also provide home service. On the nights when they make the transfers to Guadix, the 30,000 people only have an ambulance and a team at their disposal. “And then it’s not up to us to make transfers outside our territory,” says someone from the center who prefers not to give his name.
Toñi remembers, even from the hospital in Granada where her husband is still hospitalized, that the scene of the ambulance changing at the petrol station was surreal. “I was looking at it and when the doctor came out I asked him, ‘Is this real? Is this really happening?’ Toñi explains that she is not complaining about the medical care, “my husband is still alive thanks to them,” but about the degrading and humiliating treatment she suffered when a seriously ill patient was delivered to a gas station. And, above all, it exposes the critically ill patient to adverse weather conditions and the lack of a sterile and safe environment.
To Toñi’s question that evening, if this is happening, the answer is yes. And not only in those last night transfers from Baza to Granada, 102 kilometers and just over an hour’s drive without stops. At the Guadix hospital they have been making the transfer for some years, 52 kilometers and 40 minutes, to the reference hospital in Granada, with a change in the ambulance halfway through the journey.
The first vehicle travels 30 kilometers, leaves the highway and there, at the same detour at the foot of the road, the patient is transferred to the vehicle that will complete the journey. Health sources familiar with this situation recognize that Guadix’s SUAP only mobilizes sporadically, “if the angels have difficulties, which is not unusual also because its only mobile intensive care unit covers the entire province and also interprovincial transfers”.
Following the public denunciation of the UGT, these sources acknowledge, the family doctors of the health center were not called again for any transport. But it hasn’t even returned to its original situation. “They just struggle not to activate them, due to the controversy, and keep patients longer in hospital until the angels are available in the morning or they transfer them, without intensive care and only with a nurse, without a doctor.” In this case, he continues, these are “patients at the limit who previously were always transported with a doctor and nurse for greater safety and now only with nurses”.
The Junta de Andalucía, questioned by this newspaper – and cross-examined for the lack of specificity of its answer – about the reasons for these two-stage transfers and whether it was a temporary or permanent measure, limited itself to replying that “Granada has a specific unit for the transfer of critical patients between hospitals, equipped with doctors, nurses and emergency technicians to cover inter-hospital transfers. They are supported by the ground and flight teams of 061, as set out in a plan of action for the entire Community”.
In any case, according to health workers familiar with the case, the management of the Baza Hospital had scheduled a meeting in which EPES 061, the health workers and the center’s management were supposed to participate. 061 did not show up and the information transferred is scarce: the situation would continue like this until a solution was found, without specifying which one. Those familiar with the case call it “an attempt to normalize an irregular situation.”
