"Application rejected": private clinics can not cope with the flow of calls

A number of large private clinics in St. Petersburg have actually suspended the provision of services for an urgent call to a DOCTOR at home. As the correspondent of RBC Petersburg found out, having called several city medical centers, in some of them a doctor can be sent to the house only a few days after the actual appeal, and in one of the clinics, applications from patients with symptoms of SARS and CORONAVIRUS are completely rejected. The heads of clinics interviewed by RBC Petersburg call the growth in demand for medical services a record one and are preparing to work in this mode until the beginning of March.

"Application denied"

As RBC Petersburg found out, due to the large number of requests, the service for urgently calling a doctor at home is not available at the 21st Century, Medsi and Euromed clinics. it should be noted that in private clinics, the cost of calling a therapist for a patient with covid-19 symptoms reaches 8,000 rubles.

“The application to call a Medsi doctor at home was rejected due to the workload of visiting doctors, due to the difficult epidemiological situation. We recommend that you make an appointment with a doctor in person or use a telemedicine consultation with a doctor online, ”a RBC Petersburg correspondent who contacted the clinic was told.

A significant increase in the number of doctor's house calls was reported to RBC Petersburg at the Capital-Polis medical center. “The number of applications for house calls in the last 10 days has increased by about three times. Most often, it is not possible to visit the patient on the day of treatment, so we postpone the calls for 2-3 days. On average, each doctor visits 10-11 patients at home, given that the calls are not in one microdistrict, but in different parts of the city,” said Maria Shakina, chief physician of the Capital-Polis medical center.

"Sorting Calls"

Alexander Abdin, managing partner of Eouromed Group, speaks about the rapid growth in requests over the past 5-7 days. “Unfortunately, even a queue is starting to form. At the call center level, we sort patients according to the severity of symptoms: it happens that a person has a temperature of 37.5 for three days and he is worried about his condition, and sometimes a person has a temperature of 39.9 for several days and it is not removed by any antipyretic drugs. We politely queue light patients; patients who require close attention to clinical symptoms, we serve in the first place,” he says. According to Abdin, Euromed doctors make up to 60 visits a day in total.