Hospitals in France slowly catch up from Covid but disparities remain

Four years after the start of the first Covid lockdown in France, hospitalisations have mostly returned to their pre-pandemic levels, though not in all areas of the country, and wait times for doctors have gotten longer.

The Centre Hospitalier Sud Francilien Hospital in Corbeil-Essonnes, France. © Ludovic Marin/AP

The French hospital federation (FHF) says that hospital activity in 2023 “globally came back to the level observed in 2019,” but some disparities indicate that patients have not fully caught up on their healthcare since the pandemic.

The conclusion comes from a report on the state of hospital care in France, in partnership with France Info radio, published Monday.

There were about 3.5 million fewer hospital visits since 2019 than expected, according to the federation, and departments like digestive surgery, neurology and rheumatology, which cut care to make room for Covid patients, have not recovered.

Those departments have seen an 11 to 12 percent drop in patients from what would be expected in 2023, with some 260,000 fewer endoscopies performed, for example, which has impacts on patient health, with delays on detection of certain cancers.

The federation talks about a “public health debt” in which patients have put off catching up on their healthcare, with delayed treatment.

Difficult to recruit staff

One explanation for this drop in hospitalisations is the closure of public hospital beds over the past few years, most because of the difficulty in recruiting healthcare workers.

• Hospitals warn France's healthcare system is at breaking point

Another reason for the drop in hospitalisations is that patients themselves are putting off some treatment.

According to the report, which was based in part on a survey of patients, six out of ten people have put off some form of treatment in the last five years, either because the wait for an appointment was too long, or it cost too much.

The federation warns that the length of time to get a doctor’s appointment has “doubled in five years” for most specialties.

The wait time to see a generalist went from four days in 2019 to ten days in 2024 for example, and from one month to two months to see a gynaecologist or cardiologist.

Emergency rooms have picked up the slack, with 54 percent of people saying they have resorted to emergency care for situations that were not emergencies, compared to 42 percent in 2019.