The emergency trip of five toilets from Malaga to Burgos to save a two-year-old boy

A boy barely two years old, admitted with serious respiratory problems in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of Burgos, needed help;

in

Madrid could give it to him, but he had to be transferred with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), something that not just any doctor can do;

and a team of professionals from

had, in addition to the equipment and the required preparation, the will and vocation to save lives.

The planets aligned and what does not always happen happened, although common sense says that it should be the opposite, the bureaucracy stepped aside and allowed the machinery to save the life of the boy from Burgos, currently hospitalized in the Care Unit Pediatric Intensive Care (UCIP) on October 12, waiting for the evolution to start shooting.

And so, a multidisciplinary team made up of five professionals from the Maternity Hospital in Malaga traveled to Burgos last week to cannulate and connect the minor, who is in critical condition as a result of pneumonia.

From left to right, Antonio Morales (pediatric intensivist), Marina Sánchez (nurse), Francisco Vera (CCV Infanfil), Mariluz Recio (Perfusionist nurse).

It's Tuesday night, the phone rings and

, a pediatric intensivist at the Materno Infantil, answers the call.

It is the counterpart of him in October 12.

What he says captures the attention of the doctor from Malaga: a two-year-old boy needed urgent care for acute respiratory distress in Burgos and given his instability, transfer on ECMO was essential.

He confirms that they will be in charge of transporting the patient from the Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, ​​which is closer.

Finally, they cannot and since there are only three centers in Spain that can do it, the request ended up falling on the Malaga hospital, which was the furthest away and therefore the least suitable.

800 kilometers

Almost 800 kilometers separate Burgos from Malaga, but "it is not fair that a child does not have an opportunity to live because he was born in a province where they do not have this technology," Antonio Morales explains to EL MUNDO.

When they asked for help, this specialist did not hesitate, "something had to be done," he says, and he contacted the head of the Pediatric Emergency and Critical Care Unit (PICU) of the Maternal and Child Maternal and Child Hospital,

.

He did the same with the head of Nursing,

, and began to process the necessary permits.

groups were activated

and with amazing speed the team that would travel to Burgos was organized and in which they were integrated, in addition to Antonio Morales himself, a surgeon specialized in pediatric cardiology,

;

two PICU nurses,

and

;

and another perfusionist,

.

Although there were five, there was no shortage of volunteers in the Maternal and Child PICU, Morales emphasizes, and so that they could go to Burgos, others took their place.

"We are a team that likes to work as a team and we have highly trained professionals," says the pediatric intensivist.

The urgency of the request and their willingness to help even led them to take care of buying their plane tickets themselves, although the Andalusian Health Service will pay them later.

"If we wanted to go, we couldn't wait," says Morales, since "the procedures with the administration take time and the patient's life was at stake."

In less than four hours since they arrived in Burgos, the child was cannulated, connected to ECMO and stabilized for transfer, they explain from the hospital.

They then traveled with him by ambulance to the October 12 Hospital, where they were waiting for the patient.

"We travel without our material"

Given the peculiarity of the circumstances, this transfer was different from the previous ones, says Morales.

"We traveled without our material, we did not know the hospital. An ambulance from Castilla León transferred us with material from Madrid and everything used by a team from Malaga. The logistics were more complex, but despite that, the involvement of professionals from the three centers was above the difficulties", he comments satisfied.

"Each professional coordinated with their counterparts from Burgos and from October 12. We all worked as a team because transfer to ECMO was the last resort," he adds.

And despite the complexity of the situation, they succeeded and took the child to Madrid.

Observing the expressions of relief on the faces of his colleagues in Burgos and the joy on the faces of the little patient's relatives upon seeing them arrive "has been the most satisfying part of this effort," Morales recalls.

"The ECMO was the only alternative for this child, who had entered a critical situation. Therefore, we did not hesitate to coordinate a team of professionals for this transfer," says the head of the PICU of the Maternal and Child Hospital and recalls that, Although the request for volunteer health personnel was made "late at night, the response was impressive. It is really exciting to know that we have a human team so involved with such a feeling of belonging," says José Camacho.

The Materno Infantil, which is part of the

complex , has performed this procedure on children from Almería, Jaén or Marbella up to 11 times.

In addition, since the professionals of the Pediatric Cardiovascular Surgery services and the Maternal and Child PICU were trained for this, they have moved so that minors from other centers or provinces could be subsidized by this therapy and also so that minors already admitted to ECMO in their centers received ECMO transfer assistance to reference hospitals where they were going to receive heart or lung transplants.

In fact, in 2020 they carried out the first ECMO helicopter transfer in Spain to take a child suffering from interstitial lung disease to the Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona.

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