Strasbourg: A World Health Organization The official last week warned of a “closing window of opportunity” for European countries to prevent their health care systems from being overwhelmed as the Omicron version produces an almost vertical increase in coronavirus infections.
In France, Britain and Spain, countries with comparatively strong national health programmes, that window may already be closed.
The director of an intensive care unit is turning patients away at a hospital in Strasbourg. A surgeon at a London hospital describes a serious delay in a man’s diagnosis of cancer. Spain is watching its determination to avert the collapse of a testing system as Omicron keeps medical personnel off work.
“There are so many patients that we cannot accept, and it is the non-Covid patients who are the collateral victims of all this,” Dr. Julie Helmswho runs the ICU at Strasbourg University Hospital in Far Eastern France.
Two years into the pandemic, with an exceptionally infectious omicron affecting a variety of public services, the version’s impact on medical facilities has led to a re-evaluation of the resilience of public health systems that are deemed essential to providing equitable care.
Experts say the problem is that some health systems have built up enough resilience to deal with a crisis like the coronavirus, while repeated infection spikes have kept the rest too busy to implement changes during a prolonged emergency .
Per capita hospital admissions are just as high in France, Italy and Spain as they were last spring, when all three countries imposed lockdowns or other restrictive measures. The hospitalization rate of people with COVID-19 in England during the week ending 9 January was slightly higher than at the beginning of February 2021, before most residents were vaccinated.
There is no lockdown this time. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a population health research organization based at University of Washington, predicts that more than half of the people in the WHO’s 53 countries in Europe will be infected with Omicron within two months.
This includes doctors, nurses and technicians from government hospitals.
About 15% of the Strasbourg hospital system’s 13,000 staff were out this week. In some hospitals, the employee absenteeism rate is 20%. Schedules are created and reset to correct deficiencies; Patients whose needs are not serious should wait.
The French public hospital’s 26 ICU beds, said Helms, are almost all occupied by unvaccinated patients, people “who refuse care, who refuse medication or who don’t demand drugs.”
It declined 12 requests for admission on Tuesday and 10 on Wednesday night.
“When you have three patients for the same bed, we try to pick the one who has the best chance of benefiting from it,” Helms said.
In Britain, as in France, Omicron is causing cracks in the health system, even though the variant causes milder illness than its predecessors. The British government this month hired military personnel, including medics, to fill hospitals in London, to help administer vaccines and operate ambulances already in the ranks of service members.
At the Royal Free Hospital in London, Dr. lay ajay described a patient who suffered a delay in his initial cancer diagnosis.
“Unfortunately, by the time we finally got round to see the patient, his cancer had already spread,” Ajayi told Sky News. “So now we are dealing with a young patient in his mid-50s who might have been offered palliative surgery if we had seen him a year earlier. Now we are dealing with palliative care Huh.”
Nearly 13,000 patients in England were forced to wait on stretchers for more than 12 hours before hospital beds opened, according to figures released last week by the National Health Service.
About 5.9 million people in the UK are waiting for cancer screenings, scheduled surgeries and other planned care. Some experts estimate that this figure could double in the next three years.
Dr. Tim Cooksley, President of the Society for Acute Medicine, said, “We need to focus on why performance is declining and struggle for years and devise solutions to improve both in the short and long term. Is.”
Having the ability to accommodate a surge is important, and it is just this growth potential that many in Europe were surprised to learn that their countries were lacking. Those who were in a position to turn it around were the ones who were facing the crisis every day.
In the midst of the first wave, in April 2020, the WHO’s Europe office prepared a guide for health systems on how to build slack in their systems for new outbreaks, including identifying a temporary health workforce.
“Despite the fact that countries thought they were prepared for a pandemic that could come along, they were not. So it is building the ship as it sails,” Dr. David Heyman, who previously headed the World Health Organization’s Department of Infectious Diseases.
But France had been cutting hospital beds – and doctors and nurses – for years before the pandemic. Making it back in a matter of months proved too much when the current wave infected hospital workers in the hundreds every day. Even allowing symptomatic COVID-19-positive health workers to report to work is not enough.
Britain’s NHS Confederation, a membership organization for sponsors and providers, says the public health service went into the pandemic with a shortage of 100,000 health workers that has only gotten worse.
The first wave of the pandemic pushed Spain’s health system to its limits. Hospitals improved the way more patients were treated by installing ICUs in operating rooms, gymnasiums and libraries. The public watched, stunned, dying in nursing homes never to be taken to state hospitals that were already well over capacity.
After that the Spanish government vowed not to allow such a fall again. Working with regional health departments, it has given officials what it calls an “elastic plan” to deal with sudden changes in service demands, especially in ICUs.
The idea is that hospitals have the equipment and, in theory, have the personnel to increase capacity based on need. But critics of government health policy say they have warned of years of inadequate hospital staffing, a major driver of the difficulty in getting care in the current wave.
“The main thing is flexibility, flexible buildings that can expand, staff that are flexible in accepting work relocation, flexibility in terms of sharing more load of a regional structure,” Dr. Martin McKee, a public health professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Eventually, however, mackley Said: “The bed is an item of furniture. What matters is the staff around it,” McKee said.
Helms, a Strasbourg intensive care physician, knows this all too well. His unit has space for 30 beds. But with enough staff to care for patients in the 26 beds it currently occupies, the situation is unlikely to change rapidly after Omicron’s burns in the region.
In the infectious diseases unit of the same hospital, the manic scheduler is borrowing staff from elsewhere in the facility, even if it means that non-Covid-19 patients receive less care.
“We are still in the midst of a complex pandemic that is changing every day. It is hard to imagine what we need to build for the future for other pandemics, but we have to consider the system of how we care. Let’s settle,” Dr. Nicolas Lefebvre, who runs the infectious diseases unit at Strasbourg Hospital.
He said Europe was as prepared to deal with isolated outbreaks as before, but the pandemic had exposed weak foundations in entire health systems, even among the world’s best. considered to be one of the
Frédéric Valetoux, head of the French hospital federation, said policy makers at the national level were now fully aware of the problem. For 2022, the federation has requested more resources from nursing staff.
“The difficulty in our system is to shake things up, especially when we are at the center of the crisis,” Valtoux said.
In France, Britain and Spain, countries with comparatively strong national health programmes, that window may already be closed.
The director of an intensive care unit is turning patients away at a hospital in Strasbourg. A surgeon at a London hospital describes a serious delay in a man’s diagnosis of cancer. Spain is watching its determination to avert the collapse of a testing system as Omicron keeps medical personnel off work.
“There are so many patients that we cannot accept, and it is the non-Covid patients who are the collateral victims of all this,” Dr. Julie Helmswho runs the ICU at Strasbourg University Hospital in Far Eastern France.
Two years into the pandemic, with an exceptionally infectious omicron affecting a variety of public services, the version’s impact on medical facilities has led to a re-evaluation of the resilience of public health systems that are deemed essential to providing equitable care.
Experts say the problem is that some health systems have built up enough resilience to deal with a crisis like the coronavirus, while repeated infection spikes have kept the rest too busy to implement changes during a prolonged emergency .
Per capita hospital admissions are just as high in France, Italy and Spain as they were last spring, when all three countries imposed lockdowns or other restrictive measures. The hospitalization rate of people with COVID-19 in England during the week ending 9 January was slightly higher than at the beginning of February 2021, before most residents were vaccinated.
There is no lockdown this time. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a population health research organization based at University of Washington, predicts that more than half of the people in the WHO’s 53 countries in Europe will be infected with Omicron within two months.
This includes doctors, nurses and technicians from government hospitals.
About 15% of the Strasbourg hospital system’s 13,000 staff were out this week. In some hospitals, the employee absenteeism rate is 20%. Schedules are created and reset to correct deficiencies; Patients whose needs are not serious should wait.
The French public hospital’s 26 ICU beds, said Helms, are almost all occupied by unvaccinated patients, people “who refuse care, who refuse medication or who don’t demand drugs.”
It declined 12 requests for admission on Tuesday and 10 on Wednesday night.
“When you have three patients for the same bed, we try to pick the one who has the best chance of benefiting from it,” Helms said.
In Britain, as in France, Omicron is causing cracks in the health system, even though the variant causes milder illness than its predecessors. The British government this month hired military personnel, including medics, to fill hospitals in London, to help administer vaccines and operate ambulances already in the ranks of service members.
At the Royal Free Hospital in London, Dr. lay ajay described a patient who suffered a delay in his initial cancer diagnosis.
“Unfortunately, by the time we finally got round to see the patient, his cancer had already spread,” Ajayi told Sky News. “So now we are dealing with a young patient in his mid-50s who might have been offered palliative surgery if we had seen him a year earlier. Now we are dealing with palliative care Huh.”
Nearly 13,000 patients in England were forced to wait on stretchers for more than 12 hours before hospital beds opened, according to figures released last week by the National Health Service.
About 5.9 million people in the UK are waiting for cancer screenings, scheduled surgeries and other planned care. Some experts estimate that this figure could double in the next three years.
Dr. Tim Cooksley, President of the Society for Acute Medicine, said, “We need to focus on why performance is declining and struggle for years and devise solutions to improve both in the short and long term. Is.”
Having the ability to accommodate a surge is important, and it is just this growth potential that many in Europe were surprised to learn that their countries were lacking. Those who were in a position to turn it around were the ones who were facing the crisis every day.
In the midst of the first wave, in April 2020, the WHO’s Europe office prepared a guide for health systems on how to build slack in their systems for new outbreaks, including identifying a temporary health workforce.
“Despite the fact that countries thought they were prepared for a pandemic that could come along, they were not. So it is building the ship as it sails,” Dr. David Heyman, who previously headed the World Health Organization’s Department of Infectious Diseases.
But France had been cutting hospital beds – and doctors and nurses – for years before the pandemic. Making it back in a matter of months proved too much when the current wave infected hospital workers in the hundreds every day. Even allowing symptomatic COVID-19-positive health workers to report to work is not enough.
Britain’s NHS Confederation, a membership organization for sponsors and providers, says the public health service went into the pandemic with a shortage of 100,000 health workers that has only gotten worse.
The first wave of the pandemic pushed Spain’s health system to its limits. Hospitals improved the way more patients were treated by installing ICUs in operating rooms, gymnasiums and libraries. The public watched, stunned, dying in nursing homes never to be taken to state hospitals that were already well over capacity.
After that the Spanish government vowed not to allow such a fall again. Working with regional health departments, it has given officials what it calls an “elastic plan” to deal with sudden changes in service demands, especially in ICUs.
The idea is that hospitals have the equipment and, in theory, have the personnel to increase capacity based on need. But critics of government health policy say they have warned of years of inadequate hospital staffing, a major driver of the difficulty in getting care in the current wave.
“The main thing is flexibility, flexible buildings that can expand, staff that are flexible in accepting work relocation, flexibility in terms of sharing more load of a regional structure,” Dr. Martin McKee, a public health professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Eventually, however, mackley Said: “The bed is an item of furniture. What matters is the staff around it,” McKee said.
Helms, a Strasbourg intensive care physician, knows this all too well. His unit has space for 30 beds. But with enough staff to care for patients in the 26 beds it currently occupies, the situation is unlikely to change rapidly after Omicron’s burns in the region.
In the infectious diseases unit of the same hospital, the manic scheduler is borrowing staff from elsewhere in the facility, even if it means that non-Covid-19 patients receive less care.
“We are still in the midst of a complex pandemic that is changing every day. It is hard to imagine what we need to build for the future for other pandemics, but we have to consider the system of how we care. Let’s settle,” Dr. Nicolas Lefebvre, who runs the infectious diseases unit at Strasbourg Hospital.
He said Europe was as prepared to deal with isolated outbreaks as before, but the pandemic had exposed weak foundations in entire health systems, even among the world’s best. considered to be one of the
Frédéric Valetoux, head of the French hospital federation, said policy makers at the national level were now fully aware of the problem. For 2022, the federation has requested more resources from nursing staff.
“The difficulty in our system is to shake things up, especially when we are at the center of the crisis,” Valtoux said.
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