The more than 17 thousand users and professionals of the nearly 400 inpatient units of the National Network for Continuous Integrated Care (RNCCI) have already been vaccinated against Covid-19, the network coordinator told the Lusa agency today.
The administration of the first dose of the vaccine in the 396 Inpatient Units of the RNCCI, in progress since the 6th of January, has already been completed in its entirety, said nurse Purificação Gandra.
The first dose of the vaccine has already been administered to 17.204 people inserted in the RNCCI, including patients and professionals.
Of these, 14.100 people have already completed the vaccination plan (with two doses).
"The vaccination process began in January, it is about to end, because there are still some second doses in some users, but we can conclude this situation, since the second doses are already scheduled to be given to patients", stressed the coordinator of the RNCCI.
At the moment, there are four patients with Covid-19 in two units in the North of the country, but there are no professionals infected, nor any patient hospitalized due to aggravation of the infection.
"It's very reassuring for this care, and we haven't had any deaths from Covid-19 since March 6th, 7th, which also makes us breathe a little relief regarding the health situation of patients who are in the area of long-term care." advanced.
Testing the Covid-19 to professionals will remain with "some regularity", because it allows "to have some security and early detection of any case that may appear", he said.
“Many times people are asymptomatic and when you go to test there are already a considerable number of positives. So, to avoid this, we are going to continue with this testing system that has given good results», he explained.
Over more than a year of the pandemic, around 61 thousand tests were carried out to professionals, with around 2600 positive cases detected.
During this period, 161 deaths were registered in the RNCCI, related to Covid-19, of which 97 occurred in the hospital and 64 occurred in the network units.
In addition, 22.252 patients were transferred from hospitals to the National Network for Continued Integrated Care, and 2181 people who were still hospitalized for social reasons and who went to residential structures for the elderly or to nursing homes were responded to.
The coordinator added that the inpatient units have care and protection barriers that allow patients to have visits, in addition to tablets offered by the La Caixa Foundation to enable communication between family members and patients.
When these solutions are not possible, he said, “there is always the professional who makes his personal phone available to make the necessary call (…) and, therefore, people are not at all, as they sometimes want to get through, in a isolation without contact with his family,” said Purification Gandra.
“The abandonment situations were not worsened by Covid. They are the same ones that existed before and this is something that we as a society have to reflect a lot», he defended.
"Covid-19 only came to show the weaknesses of many times, the monitoring that is necessary to provide these people who are more fragile and who are hospitalized," he said.
At this time, he said, with hospitals returning "a little to their normality", an attempt will be made to respond to the situations of patients awaiting a vacancy in the network and who are referred by the community, because in the acute phases of Covid, referrals from the hospitals because it was necessary to free beds».
Portugal currently has 2.124.821 people vaccinated, of which 601.591 have already received the second dose.
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