For more than 30 years, all the most difficult patients have been taken to the Resuscitation and Intensive Care Department of the Republican Vilnius Psychiatric Hospital (RVPL). No other hospital in the entire region of Eastern Lithuania accepts them, because they do not have 24-hour psychiatrists and cannot apply targeted psychiatric treatment. Therefore, every day in the intensive care unit of RVPL, all places are occupied by patients with severe psychoses, disorders of consciousness, convulsions and other serious conditions, according to the hospital’s press release.
About 500 patients receive emergency specialized help a year. More than half of them are working people aged 18-65.
“At the moment, only RVPL doctors can provide urgent help to people with mental disorders, because resuscitation departments in regional hospitals are closed, and in Santaras clinics or the Vilnius Republic University Hospital, such patients are usually treated for no longer than one or two days. Every week, patients are transferred to us from these institutions who need not only emergency help, but also immediate psychiatric treatment. A painful event in recent days, when a patient who has consumed alcohol for a long time after treatment even in two reanimations, he was brought to us so suffocated that his breathing function was disturbed”, regrets the director of RVPL, prof. Dr. Arūnas Germanavičius.
He has no doubt that such situations will only increase if the Ministry of Health Protection closes the Reanimation and Intensive Care Department of RVPL from September of this year, as planned.
RVPL photo/Jolita Čiuderė
Does not recognize conditions that cause a mental disorder
“After just a few months, patients can be left without professional targeted emergency care. We constantly see people who were provided with resuscitation services in other hospitals, but no one recognized that the condition, for example, a loss of consciousness, was caused by a mental disorder. Meanwhile, in the Resuscitation and Intensive Care Department of RVPL, not only anesthesiologists – resuscitators, intensive care doctors, but also psychiatrists, surgeons, radiologists, internal medicine specialists provide round-the-clock assistance doctors,” says Jolita Čiuderė, head of the Resuscitation and Intensive Care Department at RVPL.
In addition, it is the only health care institution in Lithuania that applies the most advanced electric pulse therapy with a modern device, with the participation of an anesthesiologist-reanimatologist, a psychiatrist and, in consultation with specialists from other fields.
The most modern equipment is used for the treatment of all states of catatonia, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, resistant depression, severe mania, severe psychosis. Also, this method is used when there is a high risk of suicide, when the effect of antidepressants is insufficient and they begin to work only after two weeks of use or cause unwanted side effects. Since the hospital has suitable conditions for intensive monitoring of the patients’ condition, and if necessary to consult specialists in other fields, the procedure is also performed on elderly patients, when, in the presence of a severe mental state, there are concomitant somatic diseases, and the possibilities of prescribing psychiatric drugs are limited.
With the use of electric pulse therapy, in severe depression, when drugs and psychotherapy are ineffective, as well as in suicidal thoughts or psychosis, up to 80%. patients experience significant improvement. This treatment method is very safe and is used all over the world, especially in Scandinavian countries.
