Only 30 of 300 beds occupied at Warsaw Covid field hospital as it rejects “too sick” patients

Of the 300 available beds at the government’s new emergency COVID-19 hospital in Warsaw’s National Stadium, only around 30 are occupied, despite the facility being declared open three weeks ago and accepting its first patient two weeks ago.

The news comes as other hospitals in the region complain of difficulties in transferring patients to the new hospital, which is only accepting them on strict conditions. One opposition health official has called the facility a “propaganda project”.

The government and the director of the hospital have, however, explained that it was always intended only as a “buffer” and was designed only for patients with lighter symptoms.

The government announced the creation of the hospital on 19 October, as Poland’s healthcare system struggled to cope with record and rapidly rising numbers of COVID-19 cases.

At the time, the head of the prime minister’s office expressed hope that the facility could receive its first patients within a week. The facility was officially declared open on 29 October, but the first patient did not arrive until 5 November.

Although it had an initial planned capacity of 500 beds, which can be expanded to 1,200 if necessary, the hospital is only hosting around 30 patients, reports Gazeta.pl. Yesterday evening, the hospital’s Twitter account announced the arrival of a further patient.

The hospital is officially designated for patients with “lighter” cases of the illness – meaning that they should be able to eat and walk on their own, not have comorbidities or high fever, and not require more than three litres of oxygen per day, reports TVN24.

However, managers at other hospitals in the Mazovia Province where Warsaw is located say there is a pressing need to relocate patients with more severe cases of COVID-19.

At the Mazovian Provincial Hospital in Siedlce, 90 kilometres east of Warsaw, there were 95 COVID-19 patients in moderate or severe condition last week but only 45 places for them, the hospital’s director, Marcin Kulicki, told Wirtualna Polska.

Both that hospital and another in Wołomin, 20 kilometres from the capital, say that they have been unable to transfer patients to the new facility in the National Stadium because they are deemed to be “too sick”, says Kulicki.

“I was counting on the fact that – and these were the prime minister’s words – the hospital at the National Stadium would support hospitals with Covid wards,” says Grzegorz Krycki, director of the hospital in Wołomin.

Officials, however, say that the new hospital needs time to get up to full speed, and that it was never intended to take patients in the most severe condition.

“This is a new unit that, like a car, requires time to broken in,” says the director of the National Stadium hospital, Artur Zaczyński. “We cannot accept 300 people at once, half of whom will then die. The hospital is here to relieve the system, and for now there are still enough places in normal hospitals.”

“The temporary hospital, as the name suggests, is there to temporarily hospitalise patients – both those who have already passed the acute phase of the coronavirus and those in emergency departments [whose] condition is stable,” added Zaczyński in an interview with TOK FM.

The health ministry’s spokesman, Wojciech Andrusiewicz, said that the government is creating “a buffer of beds” in its temporary hospitals and will “first fill beds at the Covid wards of standard hospitals”.

However, the head of Mazovia’s health committee, Krzysztof Strzałkowski of opposition party Civic Platform (PO), says that hospitals are in urgent need of additional places for patients in serious condition. If the new hospital will not take them, then it is just a “propaganda project by government politicians”.

Local news website Nasze Miasto also reports that the cost of treating patients at the temporary hospital is many times higher than at other facilities, according to estimates from the National Health Fund (NFZ), which funds public healthcare.

The National Stadium hospital receives 4,321.14 zloty per day for treating a patient on a ventilator, whereas in other hospitals the figure is 1,154 zloty. Even the readiness cost of each empty bed is over 800 zloty per day, compared to 100 zloty in other facilities.

Around 20 further temporary hospitals are being created across Poland, as the government seeks to boost the capacity of the healthcare system amid a surge in coronavirus cases.

The army has started the construction of a temporary hospital in a hangar at Chopin airport in central Warsaw with a planned capacity of 250 beds, of which 30 will be for intensive care patients. The hospital is expected to be ready to admit patients by the end of the month.

At the start of November, six state-controlled companies were tasked with building temporary hospitals in other cities, which will have a joint capacity of 3,000 additional beds.

Main image credit: Adam Guz/KPRM(under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Maria Wilczek

Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.