By Thomas martin
Published on 28 Mar 21 @ 10:19
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The dreaded moment arrives. In a column published this Sunday, March 28, 2021 in the Sunday newspaper, around forty crisis medical directors from theAssistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) warn that they will be forced to “make a patient sorting”To face the third wave of Covid-19 which submerges the Île-de-France.
“We have never known such a situation”
“In the next fortnight”, “we have almost certainty on the number of critical care beds that will be necessary, and we already know that our care capacities will be exceeded at the end of this period” , they write.
“In this disaster medicine situation where there will be a glaring mismatch between needs and available resources, we will be forced to sort out patients in order to save as many lives as possible,” he said.
A sorting that will concern “all patients, Covid and non-Covid, in particular for the access of adult patients to critical care”.
“We have never known such a situation, even during the worst attacks suffered in recent years”, they add, adding: “we will do everything possible to delay the deadline”.
L’engagement d’Emmanuel Macron
The sorting of patients has already started: “major medical and surgical deprogramming have already been imposed on us and that we know very well that these are associated with loss of opportunity and non-access to care for some patients” . These will now have to “intensify in the days to come, soon sparing only vital emergencies”.
Thursday, March 26, after a European council, Emmanuel Macron committed to caregivers “never to put them face to face with ethical choices that are not ours”, by having to arbitrate between patients. Yet we are there …
The “flop” of evacuations
In AP-HP establishments, the number of daily admissions for covid reached very high levels this week. The incidence of infections (the number of infections per 100,000 inhabitants) continues to increase sharply in the region.
The medical evacuations that were mentioned for a while did not have the desired effect, families being reluctant to give their consent for their loved ones to be hospitalized far from them.
Aurélien Rousseau, director general of the Regional Health Agency, asked hospitals to deprogram 80% of planned operations, while a threshold of 40% had been requested in early March. The objective is to open new intensive care beds in order to reach the 2,200 beds available.
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