Hospital Vila Santa Catarina will lose beds for pregnant women – 07/17/2023 – Health

The City Hall will deactivate the maternity beds at the Vila Santa Catarina Municipal Hospital (Dr. Gilson de Cássia Marques de Carvalho), in the south zone of São Paulo. The objective, according to the management Ricardo Nunes (MDB), is to expand the number of beds and vacancies for the care of patients with cancer.

The unit, located in Vila Santa Catarina, is the only high-complexity oncology hospital in the municipal network. Of the 247 beds, 98 are dedicated to hospitalization for cancer surgery and 34 to maternity hospitals. The others are for clinical treatment, including oncology.

“The patient enters the oncology service and stays there for at least five years. He needs periodic hospitalizations, surgery, chemotherapy… We need the beds and the space where the obstetric center operates. We are going to build more operating rooms. Today, we only have two for robotics,” he tells Sheet O Municipal Secretary of Health, Luiz Carlos Zamarco.

“We are going to expand the offer of oncopneumology. In the city, only AC Camargo does it. If you look at the waiting list, there are patients who have been waiting for more than 60 days, and the legislation requires that we have to attend to them within 60 days. days”, adds the secretary.

Law 12,732, of 2012, establishes that the first oncological treatment in the SUS must be started within 60 days from the signature of the report with the diagnosis or in a shorter period, as needed.

“We have a great demand in the city. We were even called upon by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and we are responsible for oncology care so that it occurs within 60 days from the diagnosis. We had to make contracts with AC Camargo and IBCC. Even in private medicine, no we got contracts to meet all the demand in the municipality.”

According to Zamarco, in addition to reorganizing cancer care in Vila Santa Catarina, the portfolio is in conversation with the State Department of Health.

“Let’s check how much the State Department of Health will do with an oncology hospital, because it put Icesp [Instituto do Câncer do Estado de São Paulo] in the municipality of São Paulo, but it is also overloaded. We are looking at what our next step will be.”

The deactivation of the maternity hospital at Vila Santa Catarina will be gradual. The deliveries will be made until August, and the high-risk prenatal exams, until September of this year. From then on, pregnant women will be referred to other maternity hospitals through the municipality’s Regulation Center, which distributes vacancies.

Zamarco says that no one will be without assistance. “In these 1,200 public maternity beds that we already have in the city, the average occupancy has remained at 75%. There will be no shortage of vacancies. All of our nurseries are capable of premature births. We have hired brain monitoring services for all municipal maternity hospitals. “

According to the Municipal Health Department, from January to June of this year, the obstetric emergency room in Vila Santa Catarina assisted approximately 870 pregnant women per month. There were, on average, 162 births per month. At the high-risk outpatient clinic, in the same period, approximately 137 pregnant women were treated per month.

The capital has 30 public maternity hospitals, including municipal and state ones. All have an ICU prepared to care for premature infants, according to Zamarco.

Vila Santa Catarina has been managed by Sociedade Beneficente Israelita Brasileira Albert Einstein since its opening in 2015.

In May 2022, the city hall inaugurated the Bruno Covas High Technology Center for Oncological Diagnosis and Intervention at the hospital. In it, robotic surgeries of various modalities are performed —including in the digestive system (including bariatric), thoracic, gynecological, coloproctological and urological.

“Since May 16 of last year, we are returning the hospital to the areas of oncology. We inaugurated a technology center for exams, we are installing PET scans [exame utilizado para o diagnóstico de câncer], we expand to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It will be like other cancer hospitals,” says Zamarco.

In the oncology area, the hospital has more than 10,000 consultations per month, 4,000 exams and 400 surgeries, according to the secretariat.