Thriasio: complaint over staff shortages in the HDU

Serious staff shortages and conditions they describe as dangerous for patients are being denounced by the employees of the Elefsina General Hospital “Thriasio”, which is based at Magoula. According to the employees, the hospital’s High Dependency Unit, with a capacity of ten beds, employs a total of 13 nurses and nursing assistants, together with one ward assistant. That same staff, again according to the complaint, is called on to cover at the same time the eight beds of Plastic Surgery. The resulting ratio corresponds, as they maintain, to 2.6 nurses per intensive care bed, at a time when ΚΕΣΥ has set six nurses per bed as the minimum operational requirement. There has been no public response either from the hospital’s management or from the 2nd Health Region.

The issue is being raised at a time when, according to the same complaint, the hospital is treating burns patients from the fires on Salamina and in Crete, as well as people injured in an explosion at a factory in Oinofyta. The employees are calling for the Intensive Care Unit and the High Dependency Unit to be reinforced with staff immediately, so that the units can operate at the capacity for which they were designed. The High Dependency Unit is the intermediate level between an ordinary ward and an ICU: it takes in patients who need continuous monitoring of vital functions without being intubated, and its staffing determines how many such patients can be admitted at any one time.

For Western Attica the matter has an immediate practical dimension. The Thriasio is the reference hospital for the municipalities of the area, from Elefsina and Aspropyrgos to Megara and Mandra, and also the nearest hospital for a large part of the industrial axis and of the Athens–Corinth national road. It also has a burns unit, which makes it a recipient of cases from across the country when fires or industrial accidents occur. This dual role — local hospital and supra-local unit — means that any pressure on staffing shows up at the same time in the day-to-day service provided to residents and in the ability to take in serious cases from elsewhere.

Complaints about shortages at the Thriasio have been repeated in recent summers, when staff leave coincides with the peak of the fire season. The staffing indicator cited by the employees relates to the standard operating norms for intensive care units and has not been confirmed by an independent source. It also remains unknown how many High Dependency Unit beds are in practice operating at present and whether reinforcement has been requested through staff transfers from other hospitals of the 2nd Health Region. The next steps depend on whether the competent health region or the Ministry of Health will take a position on these specific figures; so far no such position has been made public.