France: 5,700 hospital beds eliminated in 2020

The French hospital system has been slowly eroding for years. This movement did not stop last year. Thus more than 5,700 full hospital beds were closed in 2020 in health establishments in France. Nearly 1,400 places for partial or outpatient hospitalization were created at the same time, according to a study by the Ministry of Health published on Wednesday.
The term full hospitalization is used by French health authorities, when the patient is “accommodated in hospital and physically installed in a bed and spent at least one night there“.

The Covid-19 has therefore not interrupted the inexorable reduction in hospital capacity. On the contrary, the health crisis has in part amplified the bed closures.

Sign of this decline, France now has less than 3,000 hospitals and clinics. “Under the effect of reorganizations and restructuring“, 25 public and private establishments closed last year, indicates the Directorate of research, studies, evaluation and statistics (DRESS) of the Ministry of Health.

The 2,983 structures still open at the end of 2020 had exactly 386,835 full hospital beds at the end of 2020, i.e. 5,758 fewer in one year – compared to the last report for the year 2019, published in July by the same statistical department of social ministries.

This drop is “a little more marked“than in previous years, which”could be explained by the epidemic context“, with “many double rooms transformed into single rooms to limit contagion“, as well as massive deprogramming to reallocate nursing staff in critical care services.

The number of resuscitation beds, which varied greatly with the waves of Covid, also ended the year up by 14.5% (or around 6,200).

A hospital sector is particularly affected by these bed cuts and closures, that of obstetrics and maternity hospitals. If the report published this Wednesday does not explicitly give data on this question, previous studies published by the Ministry of Health make it possible to grasp the extent of the phenomenon.

Maternities thus fell from 578 to 481 between 2008 and 2019 and obstetric beds from 18,053 to 15,057 over the same period. This trend is not abating since establishments have or will be closed in 2021 and others are threatened with being.

Towards a medical desert?

Access to hospital beds is uneven for the French. An observation that will undoubtedly continue with this movement of closure which continues. If the French health authorities intend to fight against the desertification of health services in the territories through the creation of local hospitals, the latter will not be provided with highly important services such as surgery and obstetrics.

The current trend is to concentrate access to all services in large urban centers. Many inhabitants of French rural areas therefore have to travel several tens of kilometers to get to the maternity ward or to the hospital.

When we compare the situation in France to other European countries, France is average, according to Eurostat data. Thus more than 580 beds are counted per 100,000 inhabitants in France, against 200 in Sweden and almost 800 in Germany.

At the World level, the prize goes to Japan with 12,000 hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants, while the United States offers only 280.

Outpatient stays and home hospitalization as a solution?

The covid-19 pandemic did not prevent the underlying trend, that of thepartial hospitalization and you “ambulatory shift“to continue, because of”staff constraints“according to the Ministry of Health. 1,369” day “hospitalization places were thus opened in 2020, bringing their total number to 80,089.

At the same time, home hospitalization experienced a “particularly lively growth“by 10.8%, or 21,276 patients”can be taken care of simultaneously on the territory“.

This type of care thus represented, at the end of 2020, “7% of total capacity in full hospitalization“excluding psychiatry, against 2.1% in 2006.

Reference-feedproxy.google.com

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