TIMECODE –Entrevista Nicholas Papachrysostomou

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:09:07
I am Nicholas Papachrysostomou and I am the coordinator of the team that is dealing with this crisis in Barcelona and in the surrounding metropolitan area.

00:00:09:07 - 00:01:14:09
In the care home where we are now, it is true that it is a very large, very large space that was never in operation and was never used as a care home. The building was conceived as such and is being appropriated to set up a care home specifically for COVID-positive geriatric patients. Here we are going to receive elderly patients who come from care homes to relieve those care homes and put all the positive patients together and treat them in the same way.
For us at MSF, who are working in the care homes a lot right now, separation is very important. The separation between those diagnosed as positive and negative makes a lot of sense because with this we are avoiding cross infections.

00:01:14:09 - 00:02:04:15
What is important to understand here, where they are all positive, is that we have to establish a safe space for both the patients but also for the health staff and everyone else who is working, administratively or in any other way. The training that we are seeing now in progress has this objective: to prepare both the health staff and cleaning staff, all the team that is going to work together in this care home, which is very large and will have 210 beds when it reaches its 100% capacity. It is to protect staff and patients.

00:02:04:15 - 00:03:09:08
The added value that we have as MSF is being able to design a space that is not a hospital to be one. So, how does the patient enter? How do the staff enter? That these flows do not cross. How do we remove waste that is infected? How are the corpses taken out? How are clean supplies brought in? Clean areas, contaminated areas. This design is complex, it is complex to do it in a sports hall, it is complex to do it in a care home. A care home is not designed for that. That is what we are doing, we are helping to design well and then we are giving all the necessary guidelines to prevent internal infection, for the staff, for patients that are not infected. With infectious diseases all this is very important, the prevention and control of infections.

00:03:09:08 – 00:03:29:03
We are preparing the health personnel to be able to enter when we have the patients, probably in the next few days, and to be able to reassure the people too, because they are going to work in an environment where they are going to treat patients that are both geriatric and positive.

00:03:29:03 – 00:04:54:19
I remember two or three days ago we were in a care home on the outskirts in the metropolitan area and when you see those in charge, like the manager or the head of the geriatric nursing team who tells you about his efforts, that maybe he did not know how to manage things well, to separate the zones. And he listens to you and you try to improve things, you give guidelines and at some point he feels, and this one man in particular, he felt that with everything I was telling him that he hadn’t thought of, he had failed; he hadn't been able to help.
And you see someone with a lot of experience, who starts crying when they start talking about this. And we are talking about people who may not have experience with COVID-19, but they do have a lot of experience, and people who are aware of what is happening ... who have lost people without being able to let them say goodbye to their relatives. Seeing a person like this, and in Spain where it is the first time that we are working like this, crying and not being able to control himself is a very strong experience for us.