In real time: On Corona ward
The Corona pandemic is not only pushing the healthcare system to its limits, but above all the people who fight for the lives of sick Covid patients in hospitals day after day. What exactly it means to care for seriously ill patients on the cusp of the fourth wave is shown by RTLZWEI in the documentary "In Real Time: On Corona Ward." The insight into the work is intense + close: With the help of BodyCams, four doctors and nurses from Zollernalb Hospital take viewers along on their grueling missions on the Corona wards.
For more than one and a half years, the staff at the Zollernalb Klinikum have been doing hard work. Infected patients still fall so seriously ill with Covid-19 that they have to be treated in the intensive care unit. The situation in the hospital is more than tense. Because the staff is at the end of its rope. "Actually, most of them can't take any more, but we have to! We are simply tired. We are exhausted," says Jürgen Reinhardt, M.D., medical division director of intensive care medicine ZAINS (Center for Anesthesia, Intensive Care Medicine, Emergency Medicine & Pain Therapy). No one expected the fourth wave of the Corona pandemic to be so severe. But the physician knows that although energy is extremely strained among his team, giving up is not an option: "We have to do it like we did in the first wave, with full energy!"
"In Real Time: On Corona Ward" shows this stressful daily work routine in the hospital. The 180-minute documentary was shot mainly from a special angle. By means of body cameras worn by the hospital employees, they take the viewers up close + in real time into the emergency room and the intensive care and corona ward of the Zollernalb Clinic. Here they experience situations that sometimes make them despair and fates that shape them forever. What this does to the doctors and nurses + how their daily work has changed due to the pandemic, they tell in the emotional interviews of the documentary.
Hospitals are working at the limits of their capacity, and the pandemic has revealed many weaknesses in the healthcare system, even beyond the record incidences and skyrocketing case numbers. Dr. med. Oliver Kinder, Senior Physician Central Emergency Department, makes it clear: "We are really struggling to get nursing staff. We can no longer operate some wards adequately, we can no longer fill all the beds, because there is a shortage of nursing staff. The workload is so high at the moment that we can't keep it up for much longer."
Broadcasting on 16th of December 2021 at 08.15pm on RTL2
Music: POPVIRUS Library