Hospitals around the world witnessed drastic changes during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, punctuated by complete closures aimed primarily at relieving pressure on the health sectors and allowing room for capacity building, but, in the end, this capacity was not utilized, according to a report published by “The” magazine. The Economist”.
The seven Nightingale hospitals in Britain closed their doors after receiving only a small number of patients, and many American field hospitals witnessed the same thing.
A study of Europe’s experience, published in the journal Health Policy, found just one example of a hospital that saw more Covid patients than intensive care bed occupants, in the Italian region of Lombardy, on April 3, 2020.
But there are now reports about overcrowded hospitals in China, with the country emerging from its sanitary isolation with a large wave of infections, but it is too early to know whether these are isolated examples or if they represent a broader systemic failure, according to the magazine’s report.
Outside of China, the Covid virus is no longer a top priority for people, however, and the report, which uses the latest official statistics and public data as well as individual hospitals, indicates that health care systems in developed countries are closer to collapse than at any time since The disease began to spread.
In Britain, the magazine described the National Health Service (NHS), the country’s state-run provider, as “in tatters”.
She stated that just before the epidemic, the waiting period for a person suffering from a medical problem that required urgent but not immediate attention, a category that includes strokes and heart attacks, was an average of 20 minutes to get an ambulance, but now they are waiting for more than an hour and a half, indicating that The time between the admission decision and the patient’s arrival in the hospital ward jumped dramatically after the pandemic.
In other countries, a survey of opinions on the quality of medical care, conducted by the company “Ipsos”, stated that patients around the world are in a “bad” situation, and confirmed that most of the population of the G20 countries expressed their dissatisfaction with medical care in 2021.
In Britain, satisfaction with health care fell by five percentage points, in Canada by ten points and in Italy by 12 points.
The magazine pointed out that hospitals in Italy, whose health sector was seriously affected by Covid-19 injuries at the beginning of 2020, took as an example the data derived from the “Pope John XXIII” hospital in the city of Permago, which was the scene of horrific scenes three years ago in which pictures of Covid patients spread. associated with respirators.
She stated that waiting times in the hospital increased slightly during the year 2020, and decreased slightly in 2021, but it jumped greatly in 2022, noting that patients looking for an ultrasound image of the breast have to wait two years, while officials in the Emilia-Romagna province are trying. , which was hit hard by Corona, to regain pre-pandemic levels.
In Australia, in the New South Wales region in particular, during the third quarter of 2022, 25 percent of patients had to wait more than half an hour for medical staff to transfer them to emergency rooms, an increase of 11 percent compared to the previous two years.
In Canada, waiting times are at “record levels”, with about half a year separating a doctor’s advice that a patient seek medical care and their receipt of medical care.
Even in the world’s richest countries, which may be able to afford the costs, Switzerland has witnessed a decrease in the number of free beds in intensive care units, compared to the peak of the epidemic, and Germany is facing the same thing, that is, a rise in the number of patients who have reduced the capacity of central care units.
In Singapore, patients had to wait about nine hours to receive medical care in regular clinics by the end of 2021, and in October of 2022, that period rose to 13 hours.
As for the United States, the newspaper indicates that the situation is better than most other countries, and attributed that credit to “the huge amounts of money that are pumped into medical care,” but it stated that its condition was not good, noting that the hospital capacity exceeded for the first time 80 per cent. percent.
And she mentioned that “even in the darkest days of the epidemic,” a few states reported severe pressure in the children’s departments (that is, 90 percent of the beds were occupied), and last November, 17 states reported that they were in the same situation, after the spread of germs among children in particular.
The magazine said, “The collapse in the quality of health care contributes to a staggering rise in ‘additional deaths’, that is, those deaths that may exceed the expected number annually.”
She indicated that for many wealthy countries, the year 2022 was worse than 2021, although the latter witnessed several waves of the pandemic.
In Europe, monthly deaths increased by about 10 percent, and Germany is in the depth of this crisis, with weekly deaths that have increased by 10 percent than usual since last September, and at the beginning of December this percentage rose to 23 percent.
Who is to blame?
The magazine indicates that a large part of the blame, whether locally or regionally, lies with politicians, but it rectified it with other factors that may be related to the common experience that countries lived through during the pandemic, and suggests that reaching a solution by the governments of countries, in the short term, may be “impossible”.
She said health spending in most rich countries is now well below 10% of gross domestic product, down from less than 9% before the pandemic.
Of the 20 countries that revealed their data for 2021, 18 spent more per capita than ever before. And almost all of them spent one more share of GDP than was spent in 2019.
Thus, it ruled out that the problem is in spending, and also ruled out another factor, which is the number of workers in the health sectors, noting that they have increased more than ever in almost every wealthy country, and that the total employment rate for 2019 increased by 9 percent for 2021 compared to in at least the year preceding the pandemic in six countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED).
And the magazine suggested that the blame lies with the effectiveness of these workers, and not necessarily their number, noting that the real output in American hospitals and the ambulatory health care sector (ambulance services), which actually measures the amount of care provided, is only 3.9 percent higher than the pre-pandemic level. , while output across the overall economy is 6.4 percent higher.
In Britain, elective care activity (i.e., pre-planned surgery) is down slightly from what it was before the Covid waves. In Western Australia, the proportion of late elective surgeries jumped from 11 percent to 24 percent in the two years to November.
In short, the magazine says that hospital staff “are doing less with more numbers,” noting at the same time that the same thing is more reflected in a “wider economic phenomenon,” but it stated that workers in the medical sector are facing more pressure.
A research paper presented by Professor Diane Coyle from the University of Cambridge sheds light on the impact of dealing with the Covid pandemic in Britain, and stated that the protocols for wearing and taking off protective clothing and sterilization procedures that many countries are still applying today slow down the processes of providing medical care, and the separation between Those with COVID and other patients will reduce the number of beds available.
The magazine said that many workers in the sector feel “unhappy” after three stressful years, as a report published in the “Mayo Clinic Proceedings” found signs of “burnout” among American doctors.
The magazine stated that this exhaustion may be embodied in the difficulty of accomplishing some things that were available before the spread of the epidemic, such as doctors staying late times to ensure that patient registration is in full swing, or their ability to deal with patients of other doctors.
At the same time, the newspaper indicates that the productivity of medical workers may not be the only reason for the situation in hospitals around the world, and stated that the increase in the number of patients in the periods that followed the lifting of sanitary isolation measures may be the reason, with the absence of mixing with certain viruses and germs. Due to isolation for two years, today, with people leaving their isolation, he contributed to the spread of some respiratory diseases and influenza.
Also, many people were avoiding going to hospitals in 2020 and 2021, for fear of catching a Covid infection, and many hospitals closed their doors to non-corona patients.
The magazine concluded its report by recalling that the effects of broken healthcare systems go beyond unnecessary deaths, and that people may feel their country is collapsing.
“If you live in a rich country and you get sick, you expect someone to help you,” she said. “Surely someone is supposed to help when the tax burden is at or near an all-time high, as it is in many places.”
She added, “The good news is that the backlog from the pandemic will go away. The surge in respiratory viruses in adults and children has likely peaked. Officials have made progress in addressing the massive waiting lists. But with an aging population, and now the constant threat, Health care before the pandemic may have seemed like it was from a golden age.