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"An
adequate alert, watch and information system would have allowed those
involved to act more quickly in implementing measures to adapt the health
care system" to help those at risk, said the team of experts who
drafted the report and published it on Monday, on what went wrong during
the heat wave. The
experts said the "compartmentalization of services between the
(health) ministry, other ministries and workers on the ground prevented a
pooling of available information" about the scope of the health
emergency. More
than 11,000 mainly elderly people succumbed to the blistering heat that
blanketed France during the first two weeks of August, a toll that shocked
the nation and sparked public fury over the government's handling of the
crisis. The
report qualified the heat wave as a "catastrophe", saying it had
revealed "a noticeable gap between the perception of health
authorities and the reality of the crisis on the ground." The
experts also criticized the lack of available doctors and hospital beds
during the heat wave, noting the "departure en masse by general
practitioners taking holiday" had had a "serious effect on the
functioning of emergency services". According
to the report, the implementation of the 35-hour work week -- especially
during the traditional August holiday period -- also made it difficult to
ensure the adequate staffing of medical facilities. France's
center-right government, especially Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei,
has come under intense criticism in the past month for failing to
anticipate the crisis, but Mattei has rejected calls for his resignation. The
country's surgeon general, Lucien Abenhaim, stepped down amidst the
controversy, but later said he had alerted authorities to the looming
disaster and felt he was a scapegoat.
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
