The Ayre Colón medicalized hotel of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital will close its doors this Friday after more than a year of activity since it opened to be able to treat patients with coronavirus on March 19.
It is the first device of this type that was opened in Spain to offer medical care to people with Covid-19 outside of hospitals and it is the only one that remained open to fight the pandemic.
The management of this hotel has been carried out as if it were a plant of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, a center that provides it with staff and resources. The floors or rooms have been fitted out according to demand and the characteristics or situation of the patients or families who need it.
The Community of Madrid launched the option of being able to host medicalized hotels to accommodate patients with coronavirus in the hardest moments of the pandemic, when up to 60,000 beds were received by the Madrid hotel association at the disposal of the regional government.
The objective of this medicalized hotel was to “relieve” the healthcare pressure at the Gregorio Marañón, Infanta Leonor and La Princesa hospitals. Specifically, it was made available to the Ministry of Health “365 more rooms to win the war” against the virus.
It was joined by others such as the Hotel Marriot Auditorium, which welcomed patients from the Torrejón de Ardoz University Hospital, the Prince of Asturias Hospital, Alcalá de Henares, and the Henares University Hospital, in Coslada.
«Close everything» except the «drain» of Barajas
The acting Minister of Health of the Community of Madrid, Enrique Ruiz Escudero , has criticized this Friday the way that the Ministry of Health has of understanding “co-governance” and has asked him “for once” to act with “common sense” after the last document approved within the Interterritorial Council, which had its vote against, in addition to that of the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia, Andalusia and Murcia.
Thus, and after yesterday the Community of Madrid reported that it was going to appeal the document, Escudero has specified that they have not yet received the order communicated nor has it been published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), previous steps for the legal services determine “what actions they are going to carry out.”
“We understand that decisions have to be taken by consensus,” said the counselor, who has once again insisted to the Government that the decisions have the character of recommendations. “Criticism is healthy and is done from a technical point of view,” he defended.
In the closing ceremony of a medicalized hotel in the Gregorio Marañón, Escudero demanded that the Government stop taking a line “so far from common sense.” “I ask you to have common sense for once,” he said, while adding that if these rules were finally enforced it would be “a provocation.”
