As the number of hospitalized and serious patients in Israel is climbing again – currently standing at over 530 – so is the pressure on medical staff.
“It is emotionally difficult to get into a fourth wave when we thought it was all behind us,” Dr. Debra West, head of the Emergency Department at Samson Assuta Ashdod University Hospital said. “When the numbers went down, we were all celebrating and trying to get on with our lives. It’s very difficult to go back.”
West said that medical staff is worrying again about getting infected or bringing back the disease to their families.
“We were the first to get vaccinated in January and now we need to get vaccinated again even though it is not clear what the consequences are,” she noted. “There is a bit of mental exhaustion.”
“We feel that it doesn’t matter what we do, it keeps on coming back,” she said.
West noted that in the first and second waves, the number of regular patients going to the ER went down significantly.
“People were afraid to come, so we saw a lot of corona patients and only a few other patients and it was actually quite calm and controllable,” she said. “In the third wav we had a lot of both and it was very difficult to juggle. Since then, we have seen a significant increase in the amount of patients coming to us, about 25% more than usual every day.”
At the moment, the hospital is managing.
“Doctors and nurses are seeing the regular patients and then getting into their protective gear to see the corona ones,” she said. “It makes it quite difficult.”
“We try to discharge patients who are not very sick,” she added. “We are trying not to overload the system and the community medicine is also equipped to treat corona patients now.”
As hard as it is to see another wave sweeping the country, the situation is not nearly as bad as it was in previous waves, Prof. Dror Mevorach, head of Internal Medicine at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, said.
At the time, the hospital hit the number of 200 corona patients as the Israeli capital was one of the cities most affected by the virus.
“Now we have about 25 patients,” he said. “Back then, there was a lot of demand for ventilators, and a lot of stress on the team because of the inability to take a break, since we were all needed.”
In February, Mevorach realized that his staff was going through too much and decided to organize support sessions, offering the help of psychologists and social workers to cope with the pressure.
The doctor, who headed a corona ward and is preparing to return to it in September – at Hadassah they have a number of physicians on a rotation for the task – noted that last winter it took him some time to understand that psychological support was needed.
“Now I’m planning on moving much earlier,” Mevorach said. “I’m much more sensitive to the problem.”
The expert, however, does not think that the situation is going to become as bad as at the peak of the third wave, when Israel had some 1,200 serious patients – in spite of the fact that the authorities are looking at scenarios where the country could have as many as twice the number, and aim to prepare the health system for it.
“Most people are vaccinated now, so I don’t think we will see the burden we saw in January and February,” he said.
The staff’s psychological wellbeing has been one of the priorities of Dr. Jonathan Rieck, director of the Emergency Medicine Department at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.
“We need to find a way to strengthen the staff and to increase mental resilience,” he said. “I don’t think we found the best way to do it yet. I think a lot of it comes from being together, sharing the burden, and being appreciated.”
Rieck noted that they are looking into different possibilities, “not only psychological intervention but also other indirect ways to get the staff mentally rested and strengthened.”
According to the doctor, we are now in the middle of a new serious wave.
“I don’t think we’ve reached the peak yet,” Rieck said. “We are seeing what we saw in other waves with the hospital beginning to fill up with corona patients, most of them serious [cases], with serious lung disease and elderly.”
The physician said that they are starting to see some burnout, especially among the nurses.
“They are the ones who carry the burden of treating these patients,” he remarked.
However, Rieck said he is not worried.
“I think that we have seen what humanity can do by producing these vaccines in an incredibly short amount of time,” he noted. “I believe we will find a way to put corona in its place so that it will be with us but sort of blend into the background of all the viruses.”