It is 8:30 a.m. on this Monday in July, Dr. Daniele Kaya-Vaur, head of the geriatrics department at the Rodez hospital center, arrives in her office. She takes a look at her diary and goes to a “staff meeting”. In front of her nursing team of 9 people (100% female), she hastens to tell about her weekend. It is true that the weather was nice and mild in Aveyron, the town is celebrating, it has just hosted the Rouergue car rally and is preparing to be a stage town for the Tour de France cyclist.
So it begins: “Saturday morning, room 402, the control radio indicates a flow; room 404, I suspected a vertebral infection and negotiated an MRI, in addition the patient is positive for Covid; room 406…” On mobile geriatric duty, the doctor checked for two days, with the support of four nurses and as many orderlies, the state of health of the occupants of thirty beds in the long-term care unit, plus sixteen for follow-up and rehabilitation care, and another thirty-one for short geriatric stays. To the patients of the hospital is added the follow-up of one hundred and thirty-five residents of the neighboring Ehpad Les Peyrieres. As a bonus, it provides the geriatric hotline which makes the link between the hospital, the city medicine and the nursing homes of the territory.
This team of old age specialists was put together during the first wave of Covid-19, in 2020. As the pandemic wreaked havoc among these people, “it was necessary to quickly set up a dedicated team, made up of an infectious disease doctor, a hygienist and a geriatrician, to set up a system for isolating Covid patients in the field”, explains Dr. Kaya-Vaur. Then, a coordinating doctor was tasked with directing care, taking into account the polypathological dimension of the elderly, so that they were immediately oriented in the appropriate sector without necessarily going through the emergency room. A way to prevent a service embolism.
The weekend call is over, Daniele Kaya-Vaur passes the on-call phone to his colleague, Dr. Elise Carrez, who will in turn answer calls, prioritize emergencies, mark the routes. “The Cursed Phone” she lets go. Because the doctor knows that she will not be able, on each call, to respond positively to the doctors’ requests and follow up on the hospitalization they expect for their patient. The service is full and release forecasts are rare. The bed occupancy rate is close to 100%.
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