Omicron exposes inflexibility of Europe's public hospitals

We’re now dealing with palliative care.”Nearly 13,000 patients in England were forced to wait on stretchers more than 12 hours before a hospital bed opened, according to figures released last week from the National Health Service.Britain has a backlog of around 5.9 million people awaiting cancer screenings, scheduled surgeries and other planned care. So it’s building the ship as it sails,” said Dr. David Heymann, who previously led the World Health Organization’s infectious diseases department.But France had been cutting back hospital beds — and doctors and nurses — for years before the pandemic. But critics of government health policy say they’ve warned for years of inadequate hospital staffing, a key driver of the difficulty delivering care in the current wave.“The key thing is flexibility, having flexible buildings that can expand, having staff that are flexible in terms of accepting task shifting, having flexibility in terms of sharing loads more of a regional structure,” said Dr. Martin McKee, a public health professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It’s hard to imagine what we need to build for the future for other epidemics, but we’re going to have to reflect on the system of how we organize care,” said Dr. Nicolas Lefebvre, who runs the infectious diseases unit at the Strasbourg hospital.