7,291 people died between March and April 2020 in Madrid residences during the first wave of covid. 7,291 people, who also died in the worst possible way, "horrible", "horrible", as described by workers at these centers: asphyxiated, drowned, dehydrated, without sedation and alone, very alone, without being able to say goodbye to their people. Four years later, those 7,291 people and their families are still waiting for an investigation into what happened in those centers. The Madrid Prosecutor's Office does not consider it necessary, although suspicions of the commission of crimes by the regional administration persist. Not even the denial of relief.
Those who have done so have been the family associations that commissioned a group of experts to investigate what happened (the commission created in the Madrid Assembly collapsed after last year's elections and the Ayuso Government has refused to recover it). And so a citizen commission was established, chaired by the emeritus judge of the Supreme Court José Antonio Martín Pallín.
After ten months of work, this commission has made public the report with clear conclusions: The elderly in the residences were abandoned by the Community of Madrid, which, through a protocol, established that those infected with physical or cognitive dependence were not referred to hospitals. In exchange, it was promised that the residences would be medicalized (ordered by the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid). The reality is that they never were and the residents died in those spaces in the "horrific" way that a worker told this citizen commission.
President Ayuso indicated a few weeks ago that these people were going to die anyway, something that the report denies: 65% of the elderly people who were referred to hospitals during the months of March and April had a survival rate of 65%. , which, applied to the 7,291 people who died in nursing homes without being referred, would have meant that “more than 4,000 people could have saved their lives,” explained Fernando Lamata, doctor and expert in health management.
Lamata has assured that the number of referrals went from 120 daily to an average of 65 between March 7 and 31, far from the 200 that should have occurred, and has stressed that there was “a closure in the referrals that had an impact on excess deaths” in nursing homes.
And the problem is that there were beds, since although the residences were not medicalized, a hospital was set up in Ifema, with more than 1,300 beds and 3,000 professionals, where residents of public centers were never transferred (only 23 minor ones), nor to the private hospitals, with which there were agreements, and which never completed the beds. During the period of operation of Ifema, more than 5,000 people died in residences "without receiving medical attention."
During the pandemic, around 8,000 patients referred and financed by the Ministry of Health were treated in private hospitals in the Community of Madrid. These patients were referred from hospitals. Patients were not allowed to be referred from the residences, unless they had private insurance. “Although it was advertised that the unified public-private system would function as a single hospital that would save many lives, the truth is that among them were not the of older people without private insurance,” the report states.
And the hotels? 14 medicalized hotels with 1,036 beds were enabled. At the time of highest occupancy they used 836 beds. "The referral of any patient from the residences to these hotels was not authorized," the text states.
Something that the Community of Madrid did authorize was that the Samur health personnel "went to provide health care to Castilla y León", all of this without stating that they "requested support from neighboring autonomous communities to increase the functioning of public centers, medicalize the residences, expand the Ifema staff or that of the medicalized hotels.” If it had been done, the Commission defends, “the patients in the residences could have been adequately cared for.”
In this way, the aforementioned report states, “people who had their homes in residential centers saw their fundamental rights seriously undermined: the right to be treated with dignity, the right to life, to health protection, to personal and family privacy, to not be discriminated against because of their age, disability or having an illness.”
The members of the Commission, chaired by the emeritus judge of the Supreme Court José Antonio Martín Pallín, also denounce that the regional government infringed the right to health care and violated the right to life by “drastically reducing the referrals of patients from nursing homes.” to hospitals” in the same period, “without having previously medicalized” said centers “to offer the same health care that the patient would have received in a hospital.”
For all the above, the report establishes that “the suffering and avoidable death of thousands of elderly people who lived in nursing homes was a consequence of perfectly conscious decisions, planned and maintained over time.”
