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The Palma Congress Centre, alongside the Meliá Palma Bay Hotel, has become the first facility converted into a hospital in Mallorca in response to the COVID-19 health crisis. The conversion was coordinated by the Son Llátzer Hospital in Palma, the top hospital in the Llevant area in which the Convention Centre is located.

The use of the accommodation and communication capacity of hotels has made them key support facilities for the health service, alleviating saturation in hospitals caused by the pandemic. The conversion also received logistical support and manpower from an Emergency Military Unit in charge of adapting and preparing the facilities for the new role.

The Meliá Palma Bay Hotel is now perfectly prepared to accommodate COVID-19 patients who need to be isolated away from their homes, while more than one hundred beds with their own oxygen supply have been installed in the Convention Centre along with around twenty ICU beds attended by the 061 emergency services. Operation of the facilities and the assignment of patients is being led by IB-Salut.

The hotel has 268 rooms on 8 floors, each of which will house a single patient, and with one room per floor used to locate Nursing Control which can be contacted by phone by patients from their rooms. The hotel also provides Wi-Fi for patients and healthcare workers as well as all the furniture, materials and cleaning and maintenance equipment that the health services require.

Maximum collaboration and coordination

With the exception of maintenance and security, all of the services will be provided by IB-Salut and coordinated from the Son Llátzer Hospital.

Meliá Hotels International, the company that manages the Convention Centre, has made all its hotels available to the authorities to be converted into hospitals if required as the risk of saturation in hospitals rises throughout Spain. The company CEO, Gabriel Escarrer, stated that "the solidarity the crisis has caused will be the best and perhaps the only positive thing we take from it. After seeing the dedication and enthusiasm of the teams that are helping convert hotels, I feel even more proud of the Meliá team.”