Covid-19: Medical facilities in Bulgaria call for volunteers
The Military Medical Academy in Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia is among health care facilities to issue a new appeal for volunteers amid concerns about medical personnel running short and suffering exhaustion.
The Covid-19 pandemic had entered a new stage of its development, the Military Medical Academy said.
As The Sofia Globe reported, October 27 daily report by Bulgaria’s national information system showed single-day records in deaths and newly-confirmed cases.
“For eight months now, doctors, nurses and frontline medical workers have been battling the infection around the clock,” the Military Medical Academy said.
It said that at the beginning of the emergency in Bulgaria, dozens of volunteers had supported the teams at the academy “a gesture that remains in our hearts forever”.
Given the situation, support was again needed.
It called on final-year medical students, health care students, specialists, doctors and nurses, and volunteers to assist in sanitary work, to come forward.
The Military Medical Academy said that volunteers should contact [email protected], giving their names, training course or profession, telephone number and e-mail address. Personal protective equipment would be provided to all volunteers, it said.
The Medical University of Plovdiv called on trainee doctors and trainee nurses to come forward.
Applicants could register at the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Public Health.
The university said that all trainee doctors and trainee nurses who were interested in working on an employment contract at university and non-university hospitals in the city and district of Plovdiv could apply. Their service would be recognised as a study activity.
Students and interns could also get involved voluntarily in performing administrative duties such as filling out documents, the university said.
Bulgarian National Radio reported on October 26 that since Friday, more than 20 volunteers had responded to a call from the University Multiprofile Hospital of Bourgas to assist doctors and nurses in caring for patients in Covid-19 wards.
Volunteers with medical training will be assigned to the Infectious Diseases Department. The rest will help doctors and nurses in other parts of the hospital, which also have patients with Covid-19.
The regional health inspectorate in Varna is seeking doctors to work in medical institutions in the district treating patients with Covid-19 not in need of intensive care.
The
inspectorate said that the medics would be given employment contracts
and would get additional pay for working with Covid-19 patients.
BNR
said on October 27 that Covid-19 wards in all major hospitals in
Sofia are full. Further beds are being provided but there are staff
shortages.
All 70 beds in the Pulmonology and Infectious
Diseases Department of St. Anna Hospital in Sofia are occupied, as
well as the five intensive care beds for patients with Covid-19.
The St. Sofia Pulmonary Hospital, which has 49 beds for patients with coronavirus, of which five are for intensive care, also has no places, director Dr. Lyubcho Penev said.
At Alexandrovska Hospital in Sofia all the beds are occupied and further beds are being provided.
The University Hospital St. Ivan Rilski has a total of 40 beds, but only for patients diagnosed with new coronavirus during their treatment there, the report said.
In other news on October 27 related to the Covid-19 situation in Bulgaria, United States ambassador Herro Mustafa posted a video message on Facebook saying that she was self-isolating because she had been in contact with the virus.
Mustafa was among those present at an event on October 23 attended by Prime Minister Boiko Borissov, who on October 25 posted on Facebook that he had tested positive.
Four of Bulgaria’s Supreme Administrative Court judges have tested positive, the president of the court, Georgi Cholakov, said on October 27.
He said that because of the growing number of people testing positive for Covid-19, the work in the system of administrative justice was becoming increasingly difficult to organise.
The Sofia Globe’s coverage of the Covid-19 situation in Bulgaria is supported by the Embassies of Switzerland and Finland.
For the rest of The Sofia Globe’s continuing coverage of the Covid-19 situation, please click here.
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