Intended to accommodate patients, the hospital itself would need intensive care.
This is what emerges from the table drawn up this Monday, March 18 in the morning by the French Hospital Federation (FHF), in partnership with France Info, four years after the start of Covid.
We already knew that the first confinement had caused a drop in activity in many departments (digestive surgery, neurology, rheumatology, etc.), since it was necessary to reserve as many beds and resources as possible for patients sick with Covid.
But this quantitative assessment, which we were able to consult in advance, is much more worrying: the number of hospital stays in 2023 remains far from those expected before the pandemic, with risks for the health of the population.
All types of hospitalizations combined (medicine, major surgery, outpatient, etc.), the level of activity in 2023 has returned to its expected value, after having fallen the previous three years.
But this does not make it possible to absorb what the FHF calls “a public health debt” or a “time bomb”, namely 3.5 million “lost” hospital stays in three years.
Above all, this return to normal “hides many disparities”, underlines Arnaud Robinet, president of the FHF.
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