Gaza/Hôpital Nasser : "Situation terrible après un grand afflux de blessés en provenance d'Al-Mawasi" (AUDIO)

In general, the staff was feeling overwhelmed, stressed, concerned for all the patients that we were receiving. There was one little boy with his father there. His father had a wound injury to his back and the boy was just sitting there looking kind of confused and bewildered and we felt really horrible for that family because I'm not sure that the boy understood that his father was the only surviving member of his family.

00:25

There was another woman as well who had a fractured femur. She was there and thankfully her mother found her, but they didn't tell her that she had lost the rest of her family. There was another woman there who was just in agony.

00:39

She had chest tube in and she had difficulty breathing but when her husband finally saw her, just the relief on his face that you know he had found his wife but you know that was like happiness but then also just shock and you know how were they going to survive this next trauma that the whole family has been put to deal with

01:07

The staff were great. I mean like I said we were the maternity department so they're not used to treating trauma but they pulled together and they were able to treat the patients the best they can and we even had some doctors from the other departments from the trauma.

01:22

Obviously they came to check up on what was going on here to check on the patients and see what they needed to order the x-rays and then send the patients to x-ray where there's a huge lineup for x-rays because everybody needed one because they were all injured and then once the x-ray was done they had to you know try to look at the x-ray on the computer but you know some of the computers weren't working or where the screen was broken because of the lack of supplies that are coming in so they couldn't see the x-ray either and then then they would send them to surgery but the surgery was already full with all the other patients that had come in through trauma bay through the ER so they had to wait and I'm not sure if I saw one of our patients the one with the the man with the chest tube he managed to go to to the OR but the woman was still waiting when when we had to leave at around three o'clock.

02:10

and and yeah the lack of lack of pain meds you know we were giving diclofenac injections for for these big traumatic wounds and and it clearly wasn't enough at one point you know you just had people in the hallway moaning in pain even though they had a dressing but then the dressing was oozing blood it was quite chaotic and quite horrific what was happening in the hospital and and the hospital system is trying to cope but it can barely cope with with the normal cases

02:36

and let alone a mass casualty event and when I say normal cases I mean like we're overwhelmed you know Nassar Hospital complex is is basically the the biggest functioning hospital in this area and has to treat everybody even though it was a very big hospital beginning with but it can't treat the whole population.

02:55

the bed occupancy rate for pediatrics is 214 percent last week the maternity department did did 25 C sections and 200 and something births last week so we're over capacity and and the quality of care is just going down with with the lack of supplies a lack of space really the lack of cleaning supplies

03:15

the infection rate I mean when we had 200% capacity bed occupancy rate patients were on the floor you know and how do you keep that clean how do you keep you know the IV line clean how do you how do you do all of this if you'd have no gloves if you have no no chlorine so the situation in the hospital is already really bad and then you add in this mass casualty incident where there's a huge influx of even more patients in in worse condition the situation is just really horrific.