By: Editorial Team Reading time: 3 Minutes
◤ RESEARCH
Messer supports post-Covid center
It is not uncommon for Covid infections to leave behind long-term effects that require complex treatment – and medical gases can play an important role in those therapies.
Dr. Emil Toldy-Schedel, Medical Director of Szent Ferenc Hospital in Budapest
People who recover from a Covid-19 infection are often still far from fully recovering their health. Many patients develop post-Covid syndrome and struggle for months with long-term effects such as coughing, shortness of breath, cardiac arrhythmia, metabolic disorders, fatigue, depression or dementia. That wide variety of symptoms makes it almost impossible to provide individual treatment tailored to the specific case in a normal day-to-day hospital context. So, for Dr. Emil Toldy-Schedel, Medical Director of Szent Ferenc Hospital in Budapest, the logical solution was to establish a post-Covid center, in order to bundle the capabilities of his institution for this challenging task.
A team of experienced professionals
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Szent Ferenc focused on internal and cardiac pathologies. But as the virus also spread throughout Hungary in 2019, the hospital began to treat more and more Covid cases and – then shortly thereafter – more and more post-Covid cases as well. The team quickly gained valuable experience that is now applied to the benefit of the patients. “Today we have a multidisciplinary team comprising pulmonologists, cardiologists, internal medicine specialists, endocrinologists and gastroenterologists,” explains Dr. Toldy-Schedel. “If required by the range of symptoms, psychiatry, psychology, nutrition counseling and physical therapy can also be incorporated into the therapy. Our approach enables a level of complex post-Covid care that hardly any other hospital in the country can provide.” It is no accident that the official Hungarian post-Covid guidelines for in-patient treatment are based on recommendations of the center, which now also offers out-patient and telemedical care.
High gases consumption
A new 150-bed facility for the center is currently under construction. The technical equipment there will also specifically address special requirements such as the higher demand for medical gases. “In post-Covid therapy, we need about thirty times more gas than we do for our internal medicine and cardiology patients,” explains Dr. Toldy-Schedel. With a reliable partner, that demand has always been met. “Messer installed the technical equipment for the complicated gas supply system and immediately provided the dramatically increased quantities of gas needed for post-Covid therapy.”
The clinic and Messer are working together to improve patient care even further: “Next we want to convert from the provision of gases in cylinders to continuous supply from a stationary tank. That will enable us to achieve even higher capacity and supply reliability and further facilitate treatment,” says Dr. Toldy-Schedel.