The Doctor José Molina Orosa Hospital in Lanzarote, attached to the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, has launched a specific consultation to attend to patients who, after overcoming Covid-19, mainly present moderate or severe respiratory sequelae secondary to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Within the post-covid care strategy, these patients will be followed up by a specialist from the Internal Medicine Service of the hospital center.
According to the Ministry of Health, the consultation tries to centralize the assistance needed by patients discharged after Covid-19 and those who, having had the disease for a longer time or on an outpatient basis, require medical follow-up due to the sequelae associated with the disease that persist months later. These patients are referred from Primary Care to the specialized consultation.
This service has been recently created and the specialist in Internal Medicine Ana Cerezales will be in charge of monitoring patients who have suffered a serious infection by SARS-CoV-2, in order to try to reduce the possible sequelae and complications caused by the disease.
The attention to these patients will also go through the Rehabilitation service, which will act in coordination with the new consultation and will preferentially attend to cases referred from Internal Medicine. The professionals of this service will determine, once the patient has been assessed, whether they should receive rehabilitative treatment of physiotherapy, occupational therapy or both, and will grant for any of these therapeutic alternatives the same preferential criterion as other equally severe pathologies.
The rehabilitation that is proposed for these patients can be carried out according to their needs in the gyms of the hospital itself or at home.
The Internal Medicine and Pulmonology services have been attending to patients affected by the disease since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been admitted to the Intensive Care Unit or the Covid ward" and who present limiting sequelae, whether respiratory such as dyspnea, and others such as fatigue and general weakness that, although they are the most frequent, are not the only ones that are treated since in other cases neurocognitive, psychological or digestive symptoms are observed that lead the patient to the corresponding specialists", it is pointed out from the Ministry.
In this regard, it is noted that in the first six months of the year a total of 323 patients have been hospitalized for Covid-19 at the Doctor José Molina Orosa Hospital. This new consultation centralizes the care demand required by these patients as well as referrals from Primary Care.