After the fire at St. George’s Hospital and the start of the Roszdravnadzor inspection, many regions stopped using Aventa-M ventilators. The number of offers should remain.
St. George’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, where five people died in a fire caused by a ventilator on Tuesday, May 12, has placed an order for 84 German ventilators. The Prisma 25ST ventilators purchased by the hospital are designed for non-invasive artificial lung ventilation. They have been manufactured in Germany this year. The cost of the contract is 27.7 million rubles. The ventilators are to be delivered by the end of the year.
After the fire in the medical institution, they temporarily refused to use Russian-made “Aventa-M” ventilators, which are currently being examined by Roszdravnadzor. “Until yesterday [the fire] there were no complaints about them, the investigation is underway… We received them on May 1,” Vladimir Sulima, head of the general resuscitation department at St. George’s Hospital, told journalists.
On Wednesday, Rospotrebnadzor suspended the use of models produced since April 1 on the territory of Russia until the end of the inspection. Many Russian regions that bought “Avent-M” have stopped using this model.
On April 24, the St. Petersburg hospital signed a contract with the holding “Radio-electronic Technologies” (“KRET”) for the delivery of 237 units of these devices manufactured by the Ural Instrument Building Plant. The total cost of the contract was 441.3 million roubles. This is the largest contract for “Aventa-M” signed by a Russian hospital during the pandemic. In addition to Aventa, the hospital also purchased three Irish devices and 16 Chinese devices for a total of 75.6 million rubles. The term of the contract for the purchase of “Aventis” has been set until the end of 2020. Until today there was no information about its execution in the registry. However, on Friday, May 15, this information appeared there. The data on the delivery of 22 devices, as well as the act of putting them into operation, appeared on the state procurement portal.
On Friday, Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov told journalists that “Avent-M” had undergone a test cycle in the factory before being delivered to medical institutions. “I can say that all these requirements and standards are certainly provided in the factory, because it is primarily related to people’s health,” he said. The press service of “KRET”, which is part of the state corporation “Rostec”, stated that devices of this brand have been delivered to medical institutions since 2012, they have been tested under high load and there have been no complaints about their safety.
It is not known how the purchased German devices will be able to replace the Russian ones, which cannot be used at the moment. Calls from the hospital to the BBC were not answered.
According to Alexei Starchenko, a member of the Public Council for the Protection of Patients’ Rights under Rospotrebnadzor, there are “problems” with the fact that patients with coronavirus do not initially receive non-invasive artificial lung ventilation. “We have regular oxygen tubes that are inserted into the nose. They kind of blow, but the patient is supposed to inhale into the lungs. This creates a cloud of oxygen around the patient, which the patient breathes in. And if he breathes poorly and inhales small volumes, if his breathing capacity is reduced, then the patient is not getting what he needs. This requires non-invasive pulmonary ventilation. In the stories I have seen, there is still not enough of it,” Starchenko explained in an interview with the “19Rus” portal. According to him, one breath of air is not enough, and therefore the patient’s condition can deteriorate.