Patients' Experiences in a Medicalized Hotel for COVID-19 Acute Care Support

The current pandemic caused by the rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) demands urgent reorganization. Hospital multidisciplinary and departmental collaboration was required to work on all the principles of overvoltage capacity, including: new space definition; provision's resources; staff recruitment; and ad hoc training. Likewise, assistant protocols suffered continuous modifications to deal with this new situation.

Catalonia is one of the 17 autonomous communities of Spain and it has been granted global competencies in the area of healthcare. The Catalan healthcare model is a multi-provider one integrated in a unique public network. The organization is structured in four integrated health areas, one of which is the Integrated Health Area of Barcelona Esquerra (Área Integral de Salud de Barcelona Esquerra - AIS-BE), caring for a population of 524,000 inhabitants, representing 35% of the population of Barcelona. The territory referred to this study, includes the Hospital Clinic as reference center, two general hospitals and 19 primary care centers. The Hospital Clínic -a tertiary university hospital- is a public institution with a long reputation of excellence in care provision, training and research at national and international level.

The management of the Hospital Clinic worked on a contingency plan, at internal and territorial level, together with the Health Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya. For the internal contingency plan to deal with the pandemic, different committees were created. Two of them were the Technical /Operational Committee and the ICU Committee. The technical committee included the Departments of Internal Medicine, Infections, Pneumology, Microbiology and all the medical and surgical departments with ICUs, occupational health, and the transversal Home Hospitalization Unit (HH) to maximize cooperation among professionals, levels of care and institutions. Hospital-at-home is defined as the service in charge of providing active treatment by health care professionals, in patient's house, for a condition that otherwise would require traditional hospitalization for a limited period of time (8). Hospital-at-home is a safe and cost effectiveness service, and has become a popular response to the increasing demand for acute hospital beds.

The idea of transforming a hotel into a healthcare facility wanted to solve three needs: a) grouping patients who required HH, b) providing more beds (offering intermediate care to patients who didn't require critical care) and c) allowing the isolation of people who cannot do it at home.

This paper consists in an observational and descriptive study with a cross-sectional design, in which we analyze patients' experience during admission in a Medicalized Hotel using a validate survey.